Broadband, High-Reflectivity Dielectric Mirrors at Wafer Scale: Combining Photonic Crystal and Metasurface Architectures for Advanced Lightsails.

Highly ambitious initiatives aspire to propel a miniature spacecraft to a neighboring star within a human generation, leveraging the radiation pressure of lasers for propulsion. One major challenge for this enormous feat is to build a meter-scale, ultralow mass lightsail with broadband reflectivity. In this work, we present the design and fabrication of a lightsail composed of two distinct dielectric layers with photonic crystal/metasurface structure covering a 4" wafer.

Recent advances in metasurface design and quantum optics applications with machine learning, physics-informed neural networks, and topology optimization methods.

As a two-dimensional planar material with low depth profile, a metasurface can generate non-classical phase distributions for the transmitted and reflected electromagnetic waves at its interface. Thus, it offers more flexibility to control the wave front. A traditional metasurface design process mainly adopts the forward prediction algorithm, such as Finite Difference Time Domain, combined with manual parameter optimization.

Three-dimensional ultra-broadband absorber based on novel zigzag-shaped structure.

Absorbers have potential applications in the stealth field. However, limited bandwidth and low absorption rate persist in existing methods. Moreover, absorbers working in the low frequency range (1-4 GHz) with small size are much more difficult to realize.

High-efficiency and ultra-broadband asymmetric transmission metasurface based on topologically coding optimization method.

Achieving asymmetric transmission effects, especially in an ultra-broadband frequency region, is of particular importance in communication systems. Currently available asymmetric transmission metasurfaces are limited to narrow bands and low efficiencies because of the inherently dispersion effects and large transmission fluctuations. In this paper, we propose a new strategy to realize high efficiency and ultra-broadband asymmetric transmission in an ultra-thin profile by using the topologically coding optimization method.