Advanced Optical Imaging Based on Metasurfaces

Abstract

Recently, metasurfaces have arisen as next-generation optics with various merits, such as being ultrathin and lightweight with multi-function integration. Numerous applications of metasurfaces have been demonstrated up to now, including wavefront shaping, optical imaging, hologram display, structured light generation, polarization detection, and so on. Among them, optical imaging components and techniques have been substantially promoted with the advent of metasurfaces due to their superior spatial modulation properties over electromagnetic waves. Here, the forward and reverse design approaches of metasurface and recent advances in various imaging applications based on them are reviewed. Due to the ability of arbitrary wavefront encoding, metasurfaces have been widely applied to numerous imaging applications, including diffraction-limited imaging with aberration correction, polarization-related imaging, high-resolution spectral imaging, three-dimentional (3D) imaging, and even algorithm-assisted imaging, etc. Optical imaging applications combined with novel metasurfaces can make breakthroughs with the development of nanofabrication technologies and the improvement of computer algorithms.