Subwavelength sorting of full-color based on anti-Hermitian metasurfaces

Abstract

Splitting the spectrum of incident light at nanoscale has been of great scientific and practical interest due to its potential application in various optical sensors. For many years, researchers have been striving to realize the full-color sorting of light at subwavelength scale, while keeping the loss of incident photons to a minimum. In this article, we present semiconductor-based metasurfaces that facilitate the efficient sorting of full-color by inducing anti-Hermitian coupling between multiple nanoantenna arrays. To achieve this, we first explore how the coherent interactions between maximally crafted nanoantennas in the metasurfaces can be effectively controlled by judiciously positioning them in both lateral and vertical directions, which leads to the switched coupling of light at each target position. Based on the analysis, we demonstrate a metasurface-based absorber that features efficient, spectropolarimetric detections over the entire visible spectrum, ranging from 470 to 630 nm. In addition, the metasurface detects relatively narrow spectral linewidth of 60 nm and shows the sensitivity up to 70%, which surpasses the previous works on subwavelength photon sorting or color filter-based detection system. We envision that our approach provides guidelines for realizing the metasurfaces with enhanced functionalities, that is the increase of spectral channels for detection in a given subwavelength-scaled unit cell.