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Dynamic polarization rotation and vector field steering based on phase change metasurface

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Abstract

Polarization rotation and vector field steering of electromagnetic wave are of great significance in modern optical applications. However, conventional polarization devices are bulky, monofunctional and lack of tunability, which pose great challenges to the miniaturized and multifunctional applications. Herein, we propose a meta-device that is capable of multi-state polarization rotation and vector field steering based on phase change metasurface. The supercell of the meta-device consists of four Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) elliptic cylinders located on a SiO2 substrate. By independently controlling the phase state (amorphous or crystalline) of each GST elliptic cylinder, the meta-device can rotate the polarization plane of the linearly polarized incident light to different angles that cover from 19.8° to 154.9° at a wavelength of 1550 nm. Furthermore, by merely altering the phase transition state of GST elliptic cylinders, we successfully demonstrated a vector field steering by generating optical vortices carrying orbital angular momentums (OAMs) with topological charges of 0, 1 and −1, respectively. The proposed method provides a new platform for investigating dynamically tunable optical devices and has potential applications in many fields such as optical communications and information processing.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for financial supports from the Guangdong Major Project of Basic Research (Grant No. 2020B0301030009), the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFB1801801), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61935013, 61975133, 11947017, and 12104318), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (Grant No. 2020A1515011185), the Science and Technology Innovation Commission of Shenzhen (Grant Nos. KQTD20170330110444030, JCYJ2018 0507182035270, and JCYJ20200109114018750), Shenzhen University (Grant No. 2019075), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2021T140470).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanophotonics Research Center, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Micro-scale Optical Information Technology, Institute of Microscale Optoelectronics, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Hairong He, Hui Yang, Zhenwei Xie & Xiaocong Yuan

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  1. Hairong He
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  2. Hui Yang
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  3. Zhenwei Xie
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  4. Xiaocong Yuan
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Contributions

H.H. designed and simulated the structure. The project was conceived and supervised by Z.X. and X.Y.. All authors analyzed and discussed the results and approved it for publication.

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Correspondence to Zhenwei Xie.

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Data underlying the results presented in this paper are not publicly available at this time but can be obtained from the authors upon reasonable request.

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The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be constructed as a potential conflict of interest.

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He, H., Yang, H., Xie, Z. et al. Dynamic polarization rotation and vector field steering based on phase change metasurface. Front. Phys. 18, 12303 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-022-1214-x

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