NU 2017-060
Inventors
Alan Sahakian*
Koray Aydin
Francois Calleaert
Short Description
A platform that combines an inverse electromagnetic design computational method with additive manufacturing to design and fabricate all-dielectric metadevices.
Background
Building miniature optical devices is desirable for creating ultra sensing devices with excellent performance. Metasurfaces perform optical functionalities such as lensing, holograms, and beam shaping within an extremely thin layer. They are made by depositioning thin layers of dielectric materials by diverse methods (sputtering, electron beam lithography, etc.), which may ultimately limit the scalability for fabrication and cost-savings.While the ability to control phase, amplitude and polarization using subwavelength thick metasurfaces is a promising route towards building miniature optical devices, they suffer from several drawbacks prohibiting their potential in replacing conventional bulk optical elements. Ultrathin metasurfaces, for instance, often yield polarization dependent and narrowband optical responses as their design relies on subwavelength optical resonators. Through an inverse electromagnetic design method, these limitations can be overcome to produce high-efficiency, broadband, dielectric-thin metadevices, that can further be prototyped and manufactured by additive manufacturing or 3D printing.
Abstract
Northwestern researchers have developed a novel platform for the design and fabrication of millimeter-wave metadevices using an inverse electromagnetic design algorithm and additive manufacturing (AM). AM offers a bottom-up approach for the easy, relatively rapid, and highly scalable fabrication of materials with intricate designs at a relatively low cost. Using this method, high performance (high-efficiency (>60%), broadband (Dl/l > 25%)) metadevices, at millimeter-wave range have already been realized at high efficiencies and due to the scalability of Maxwell's equations similar devices can be designed to operate at visible to microwave frequency range provided that a low-loss dielectric material can be fabricated with subwavelength feature sizes. This novel design and fabrication platform addresses the need for rapid versatile design and prototyping of compact, low-cost, low-loss and broadband components that can be easily integrated into complex electromagnetic systems for applications in aerospace, military communications and other equipment.
Applications
Advantages
Publications
Callewaert F, Velev V, Kumar P, Sahakian AV and Aydin K (2018) Inverse-Designed Broadband All-Dielectric Electromagnetic Metadevices. Scientific Reports 8: 1358.
IP Status
US patent and PCT applications have been filed.