Review: recent progress in metal-less metasurfaces and metamaterials

Abstract

Plasmonic metamaterials (MMs) are based on light coupling to metal free electrons, which inherently accompanied with severe dissipation losses that usually limit device performance. Furthermore, the complexity in designing 3D plasmonic MMs have left them far beyond from being realized in the real market for on-chip nanophotonic applications. Dielectric MMs have alternatively served as an ultimate solution to tackle the low efficiency problem of metal-based MMs. In this review paper, we present optically thin dielectric-based metasurfaces (DMs) that allow for phase and polarization manipulation of light. DMs are essentially based on excitation of double Mie resonance effect, which inherits DMs the ability to modulate light with 2π phase modulation, thus, serving in variety of applications including metalens, beam steering, holograms and optical chirality. Two main classes of DMs are mainly covered which are: Huygens’s metaurfaces and Geometric phase metasurfaces. We first introduce the underlying physics of DMs and propose applications that have been realized with high efficiencies. In the second part, we demonstrate another class of MMs which is semiconductor based hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM). Semiconductor based HMM has two main advantages which are: their ease of fabrication in analogy with DMs and their ability to operate in the mid IR range. We outline HMMs’ applications including thermal harvesting, focusing and mid IR absorption. Finally, we overview the current challenges and future goals for the field of dielectric MMs in order to be realized for real market application.