Principal Investigator: Associate Professor Qiu Chengwei, ECE

Metasurface is a structured interface composed of an array of nanostructures, which is able to arbitrarily manipulate light wave at the subwavelength scale. The development of metasurfaces has inspired a revolution in photonic research with potential applications in compact optical elements, information storage, optical communications and advanced biosensing. However, for most metasurface-based devices, the achievable functionalities are limited, and thus the multiplexed usage of a single metasurface for different functionalities has attracted growing attentions. On the other hand, the functionalities of a metasurface are usually fixed once the device is designed and fabricated. It is a challenging yet important issue to actively modulate the optical properties of a metasurface to realize different functionalities.

In this project, we are dedicated to deal with these two problems and develop reprogrammable metasurfaces for information multiplexing. Perovskite material is adopted to construct the unit nanostructures of metasurfaces, whose optical parameters (dielectric index) can be repeatedly and reversibly changed by laser irradiation through the optomagnetization effects. Meanwhile, instead of a plane wave, the incident light onto a metasurface will have a predefined phase distribution, so that different performances can be demonstrated through the tuning of predefined phase. Besides, the wavelength, polarization and orbital angular momentum of the incident light can function as additional degrees of freedom to enable further information multiplexing. This project is strongly related the second scheme of adaptive and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces.