MEMS-tunable dielectric metasurface lens using thin-film PZT for large displacements at low voltages.

Tunable focusing is a desired property in a wide range of optical imaging and sensing technologies but has tended to require bulky components that cannot be integrated on-chip and have slow actuation speeds. Recently, integration of metasurfaces into electrostatic micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) architectures has shown potential to overcome these challenges but has offered limited out-of-plane displacement range while requiring large voltages. We demonstrate for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, a movable metasurface lens actuated by integrated thin-film PZT MEMS, which has the advantage of offering large displacements at low voltages.

Dynamic piezoelectric MEMS-based optical metasurfaces.

Optical metasurfaces (OMSs) have shown unprecedented capabilities for versatile wavefront manipulations at the subwavelength scale. However, most well-established OMSs are static, featuring well-defined optical responses determined by OMS configurations set during their fabrication, whereas dynamic OMS configurations investigated so far often exhibit specific limitations and reduced reconfigurability. Here, by combining a thin-film piezoelectric microelectromechanical system (MEMS) with a gap-surface plasmon-based OMS, we develop an electrically driven dynamic MEMS-OMS platform that offers controllable phase and amplitude modulation of the reflected light by finely actuating the MEMS mirror.

2D back-side diffraction grating for improved light trapping in thin silicon solar cells.

Light-trapping techniques can be used to improve the efficiency of thin silicon solar cells. We report on numerical investigation of a light trapping design consisting of a 2D back-side diffraction grating in combination with an aluminum mirror and a spacing layer of low permittivity to minimize parasitic absorption in the aluminum. The light-trapping design was compared to a planar reference design with antireflection coating and back-side aluminum mirror.