Linear-to-circular polarization conversion with full-silica meta-optics to reduce nonlinear effects in high-energy lasers.

High-energy lasers have benefited from intense efforts to bring light-matter interactions to new standards and to achieve laser fusion ignition. One of the main issues to further increasing laser energy is the resistance of optical materials to high laser fluences, in particular at the final stage of the laser beamline where nonlinear Kerr effects can occur in optical materials and provoke laser filamentation. One promising way to mitigate this process is to reduce the nonlinear susceptibility of the material by switching the polarization from a linear to a circular state.

Publisher Correction: Integrated photonic guided metalens based on a pseudo-graded index distribution.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Integrated photonic guided metalens based on a pseudo-graded index distribution.

In this article, we report an integrated optical nanolens exhibiting a pseudo-graded index distribution in a guided configuration. This dielectric metalens relies on a permittivity distribution through dielectric strips of the core material, which is compatible with existing silicon photonic technology. We show in this paper that effective medium theory (EMT) inaccurately predicts the focal length of such devices, and we propose an efficient and accurate design approach based on 2D finite element method (FEM) mode calculations that are in good agreement with 3D FDTD simulations.