Tunable Metasurface Inverse Design for 80% Switching Efficiencies and 144° Angular Deflection

• DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00787
• Publication Date: 2020-07-28T19:35:50Z
• Authors: Haejun Chung; Owen D. Miller
• Keywords: Ranging; Intuition

Tunable metasurfaces have demonstrated the potential for dramatically enhanced functionality applications including sensing, ranging and imaging. Liquid crystals (LCs) fast switching speeds, low cost, mature technological development, offering a versatile platform electrical tunability. However, to date, electrically tunable are typically designed at single operational state using physical intuition, without controlling alternate states thus leading limited efficiencies (<30%) small angular deflection (<25°). Here, we use large-scale computational "inverse design" discover high-performance designs through adjoint-based local-optimization design iterations within global-optimization search. We study explain physics of these devices, which heavily rely on sophisticated resonator fully utilize very permittivity change incurred by liquid-crystal voltage. The optimal devices show angles from 12° 144° above 80%, exhibiting 6× improvements efficiency compared current state-of-the-art.