Cavity-enhanced metallic metalens with improved Efficiency

Metasurfaces are made of subwavelength nanoantennas with a flat, ultrathin architecture, and strong capability in manipulating the propagation of light by flexible modulations on its phase, amplitude, and polarization. Conventional metallic metalenses always suffer from its low efficiencies due to large intrinsic loss. Here, we demonstrate a cavity enhanced bilayer metalens composed of aluminum nanobars and its complementary structures. The focusing and imaging experiments definitely show an improved efficiency of such kind of bilayer metalens compared with its single layer counterpart. Detailed theoretical analyses based on full-wave simulations are carried out with respect to different cavity lengthes and working wavelengths, which reveals that the improvement rightly attributes to enhanced cavity mode. Our design will not only improve the working efficiency for metalens with simplified manufacturing procedure, but also indicates more possibilities by employing the metal as electrodes.