Overcoming the limitations of current nanofabrication techniques to achieve nanoscale feature sizes is essential for achieving new regimes of light-matter interactions at extreme frequencies and length scales. Here, we demonstrate a scalable nanofabrication platform capable of producing in-plane feature sizes down to 1.75 nm, pushing the boundaries of current top-down nanofabrication techniques. Using precise thickness control of atomic layer deposition (ALD) and employing widely spaced oxide nanofins, we transform conventional ALD into a surface structuring method that produces nanolaminates with sub-10 nm periodicities over large areas. The resulting nanostructures can be used as a one-dimensional gate array to control charge carriers in two-dimensional materials. As an initial demonstration, we integrate the platform with graphene and perform electron transport measurements. In the presence of the gate array enabled by the nanolaminate, we observe satellite Dirac peaks consistent with band-structure modulation, suggestive of quantum-confinement effects. Our platform paves the way for exploring previously inaccessible regimes of nanoscale light-matter interactions, holding significant promise for applications in short wavelength optics, electronics, and polaritonics.

In atomic physics, tuning the light frequency across a resonance reverses the trapping force between bright and dark field regions, yet a unified analytical description of this principle applicable to photonic resonators in general has not been established. Here we show that sweeping the incident wavelength through a resonance in the optical response of the particle or device induces a π phase shift, reversing the gradient force from attractive to repulsive. A generalized Fano line-shape model captures this quantitatively across physically distinct resonant systems, from plasmonic nanoparticles to high-Q metasurfaces, with full-wave simulations confirming the predictions in every case. Building on this framework, three-dimensional singularity trapping of silicon nanoparticles is demonstrated using counter-propagating vector beams and metasurfaces, with trapping potential depths competitive with conventional bright-field traps. These results establish a platform-independent design principle for controlling optical forces in resonant systems, with broad implications for optical manipulation, quantum optomechanics, and precision metrology.

Metasurfaces, optics made from subwavelength-scale nanostructures, have been limited to millimeter-sizes by the scaling challenge of producing vast numbers of precisely engineered elements over a large area. In this study, we demonstrate an all-glass 100 mm diameter metasurface lens (metalens) comprising 18.7 billion nanostructures that operates in the visible spectrum with a fast f-number (f/1.5, NA = 0.32) using deep-ultraviolet (DUV) projection lithography. Our work overcomes the exposure area constraints of lithography tools and demonstrates that large metasurfaces are commercially feasible. Additionally, we investigate the impact of various fabrication errors on the imaging quality of the metalens, several of which are specific to such large area metasurfaces. We demonstrate direct astronomical imaging of the Sun, the Moon, and emission nebulae at visible wavelengths and validate the robustness of such metasurfaces under extreme environmental thermal swings for space applications.

Macroscopic attosecond currents driven in dielectrics by strong light fields after carrier injection by extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) light reveal nonequilibrium conduction band carrier dynamics. To introduce spatial resolution to attosecond physics, we demonstrate novel EUV metasurfaces.

Metasurfaces, with their ability to control electromagnetic waves, hold immense potential in optical device design, especially for applications requiring precise control over dispersion. This work introduces an approach to dispersion engineering using heterogeneous freeform metasurfaces, which overcomes the limitations of conventional metasurfaces that often suffer from poor transmission, narrow bandwidth, and restricted polarization responses. By transitioning from single-layer, canonical meta-atoms to bilayer architectures with non-intuitive geometries, our design decouples intrinsic material properties (refractive index and group index), enabling independent engineering of phase and group delays as well as higher-order dispersion properties, while achieving high-efficiency under arbitrary polarization states. We implement a two-stage multi-objective optimization process to generate libraries of meta-atoms, which are then utilized for the rapid design of dispersion-engineered metasurfaces. Additionally, we present a bilayer metasurface stacking technique, paving the way for the realization of high-performance, dispersion-engineered optical devices. Our approach is validated through the demonstration of metasurfaces exhibiting superior chromatic aberration correction and broadband performance, with over 81% averaged efficiency across the 420-nm visible-to-near-infrared bandwidth. Our synergistic combination of advanced design physics, powerful freeform optimization methods, and bi-layer nanofabrication techniques represents a significant breakthrough compared to the state-of-the-art while opening new possibilities for broadband metasurface applications.

Optical singularities, which are positions within an electromagnetic field where certain field parameters become undefined, hold significant potential for applications in areas such as super-resolution microscopy, sensing, and communication. This potential stems from their high field confinement and characteristic rapidly-changing field distributions. Although the systematic characterization of the first singularities dates back many decades, recent advancements in sub-wavelength wavefront control at optical frequencies have led to a renewed interest in the field, and have substantially expanded the range of known optical singularities and singular structures. However, the diversity in descriptions, mathematical formulations, and naming conventions can create confusion and impede accessibility to the field. This review aims to clarify the nomenclature by demonstrating that any singular field can be conceptualized as a collection of a finite set of principal, 'generic' singularities. These singularities are robust against small perturbations due to their topological nature. We underscore that the control over the principal properties of those singularities, namely, their protection against perturbations and their dimension, utilizes a consistent mathematical framework. Additionally, we provide an overview of current design techniques for both stable and approximate singularities and discuss their applications across various disciplines.

Metasurfaces enable the shaping of wavefronts in arbitrary ways, by dispersion engineering of the meta-atoms. Here I will review my group research on singularity engineering, including arrays of equally spaced 0D singularities, 2D singular sheets of arbitrary shapes and topoiogically protected singularities in the 4D space encompassing real space and wavelength. In the latter when a perturbation is added to the metasurface the singularity in the focal spot is preserved but shifts in wavelength, signaling topological protection.

We design and experimentally demonstrate a new type of topologically protected polarization singularity using metasurfaces. The singularity is placed in the four-dimensional space formed by the three Cartesian spatial dimensions and the wavelength of light.

Optical traps using nonconservative forces instead of conservative intensity-gradient forces expand the trap parameter space. Existing traps with nonconservative helicity-dependent forces are limited to chiral particles and fields with helicity gradients. We relax these constraints by proposing helicity and polarization gradient optical trapping of achiral particles in evanescent fields. We further propose an optical switching system in which a microsphere is trapped and optically manipulated around a microfiber using polarization gradients. Our Letter deepens the understanding of light-matter interactions in polarization gradient fields and expands the range of compatible particles and stable trapping fields.

Phase singularities are loci of darkness surrounded by monochromatic light in a scalar field, with applications in optical trapping, super-resolution imaging, and structured light-matter interactions. Although 1D singular structures, like optical vortices, are common due to their robust topological properties, uncommon 0D (point) and 2D (sheet) singularities can be generated by wavefront-shaping devices like metasurfaces. With the design flexibility of metasurfaces, we deterministically position ten identical point singularities using a single illumination source. The phasefront is inverse-designed using phase-gradient maximization with an automatically-differentiable propagator and produces tight longitudinal intensity confinement. The array is experimentally realized with a TiO 2 metasurface. One possible application is blue-detuned neutral atom trap arrays, for which this field would enforce 3D confinement and a potential depth around 0.22 mK per watt of incident laser power. We show that metasurface-enabled point singularity engineering may significantly simplify and miniaturize the optical architecture for super-resolution microscopes and dark traps.

Phase singularities are loci of darkness surrounded by light in a scalar field. We engineer an array of closely-spaced identical point singularities structured along the optic axis. The array is experimentally realized with a TiO2 metasurface under 760 nm narrowband illumination. We study possible application in blue-detuned neutral atom trap arrays, for which this field would enforce 3D confinement and a potential depth around 0.22 mK per watt of trapping power. The field is tolerant to around 10 nm changes in wavelength with a 0.11 degree angular bandwidth. Metasurface-enabled point singularity engineering may simplify and miniaturize the architecture required for super-resolution microscopes and dark traps.

We present a path to truly ‘flat’, all-oxide metalenses working at visible wavelength comprising high-aspect ratio TiO 2 nanopillars infused into fused silica substrate. We show both a proof-of-concept infused metalens using electron-beam lithography, and an example of mass-manufacturing using deep-ultraviolet projection lithography.

Differentiable models enable the efficient computation of parameter gradients for continuous functions, greatly expediting the optimization of high-dimensional systems. This makes them an asset for the design of nanostructured metasurfaces. The adjoint variable method (AVM) is the workhorse for photonic gradient computation but can be challenging to implement with the finite difference time domain (FDTD) electromagnetic simulation method for certain optimization problems. Automatic differentiation (AD) platforms remove the need for manual constructions while retaining favorable computational scaling, but high memory consumption limits their application to small systems. Here, we introduce a method of gradient calculation based on the direct differentiation of the FDTD update equations by leveraging the time-reversible nature of Maxwell’s equations. We support open and closed systems by recording the time-dependent fields at lossy boundaries and playing them back during the time-reversed FDTD simulation. The method is generally applicable without the high memory consumption of AD by eliminating redundant memory operations performed at each time step. We demonstrate this architecture in a 3D FDTD simulation. Its computational cost is comparable to the adjoint method, and it reduces memory requirements by 98% compared to an equivalent AD calculation for calculating a 900-element gradient vector. The differentiable simulator is applied to design two systems: a color sorter with frequency-domain behavior and a resonant nanostructure array with time-domain behavior. This approach to differentiate grid-based simulators is applicable to a broad range of physics simulators, thereby broadening the scope of inverse design topology optimization across fields.

Optical singularities play a major role in modern optics and are frequently deployed in structured light, superresolution microscopy, and holography. While phase singularities are uniquely defined as locations of undefined phase, polarization singularities studied thus far are either partial, i.e., bright points of well-defined polarization, or are unstable for small field perturbations. We demonstrate a complete, topologically protected polarization singularity; it is located in the four-dimensional space spanned by the three spatial dimensions and the wavelength and is created in the focus of a cascaded metasurface-lens system. The field Jacobian plays a key role in the design of such higher-dimensional singularities, which can be extended to multidimensional wave phenomena, and pave the way for unconventional applications in topological photonics and precision sensing.

We simulated a free-standing metasurface-based Faraday rotator design. The device gives a high transmittance, large Faraday rotation angle, and figure of merit ~24 times higher than a conventional device at the wavelength of 755nm.

We show that the approximate optical response of a periodic nanostructure with respect to normally incident partially coherent illumination can be reconstructed by a single electromagnetic simulation.

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation is a key technology for material science, attosecond metrology, and lithography. Here, we experimentally demonstrate metasurfaces as a superior way to focus EUV light. These devices exploit the fact that holes in a silicon membrane have a considerably larger refractive index than the surrounding material and efficiently vacuum-guide light with a wavelength of ~50 nanometers. This allows the transmission phase at the nanoscale to be controlled by the hole diameter. We fabricated an EUV metalens with a 10-millimeter focal length that supports numerical apertures of up to 0.05 and used it to focus ultrashort EUV light bursts generated by high-harmonic generation down to a 0.7-micrometer waist. Our approach introduces the vast light-shaping possibilities provided by dielectric metasurfaces to a spectral regime that lacks materials for transmissive optics.

Optical metasurfaces composed of precisely engineered nanostructures have gained significant attention for their ability to manipulate light and implement distinct functionalities based on the properties of the incident field. Computational imaging systems have started harnessing this capability to produce sets of coded measurements that benefit certain tasks when paired with digital post-processing. Inspired by these works, we introduce a new system that uses a birefringent metasurface with a polarizer-mosaicked photosensor to capture four optically-coded measurements in a single exposure. We apply this system to the task of incoherent opto-electronic filtering, where digital spatial-filtering operations are replaced by simpler, per-pixel sums across the four polarization channels, independent of the spatial filter size. In contrast to previous work on incoherent opto-electronic filtering that can realize only one spatial filter, our approach can realize a continuous family of filters from a single capture, with filters being selected from the family by adjusting the post-capture digital summation weights. To find a metasurface that can realize a set of user-specified spatial filters, we introduce a form of gradient descent with a novel regularizer that encourages light efficiency and a high signal-to-noise ratio. We demonstrate several examples in simulation and with fabricated prototypes, including some with spatial filters that have prescribed variations with respect to depth and wavelength.

Metasurfaces have been extensively engineered to produce a wide range of optical phenomena, allowing exceptional control over the propagation of light. However, they are generally designed as single-purpose devices without a modifiable postfabrication optical response, which can be a limitation to real-world applications. In this work, we report a nanostructured planar-fused silica metalens permeated with a nematic liquid crystal (NLC) and gold nanoparticle solution. The physical properties of embedded NLCs can be manipulated with the application of external stimuli, enabling reconfigurable optical metasurfaces. We report the all-optical, dynamic control of the metalens optical response resulting from thermoplasmonic-induced changes of the NLC solution associated with the nematic-isotropic phase transition. A continuous and reversible tuning of the metalens focal length is experimentally demonstrated, with a variation of 80 μm (0.16% of the 5 cm nominal focal length) along the optical axis. This is achieved without direct mechanical or electrical manipulation of the device. The reconfigurable properties are compared with corroborating numerical simulations of the focal length shift and exhibit close correspondence.