About this Research Topic

Background

Unlike electronics, optics did not follow Moore's law. While technology has witnessed a progressive downscaling of electronic components and a dramatic increase in computing power density, optics has been struck on common bulk optics and standard elements for decades. Classical diffractive optics and liquid-crystal devices tried to overturn this trend, but the real paradigm change was introduced by metasurfaces. Furthermore, advanced flat optics, represented by metasurfaces, provided many more degrees of freedom for light manipulation. Thus, structuring matter at the nanoscale into subwavelength digital metaunits paved the way for unprecedented methods to manipulate light employing flat and miniaturizable optical devices. The digital design opened to the well-established techniques of semiconductor manufacturing, pursuing the long-awaited merging between the two complementary worlds of optics and silicon photonics. Concurrently, the combined control over many physical dimensions enabled new functionalities such as complex polarization manipulation, aberration corrections, geometric phase and material dispersion engineering, which were challenging for traditional bulk optics. That inspired a rich variety of totally-new optical devices or improved the compactness of existing architectures, routing unique innovations in microscopy, imaging, micromanipulation, and information transferring and processing in both classical and quantum regimes.

Since the first demonstrations of achromatic metalenses for imaging and microscopy, this paradigm shift has moved to revolutionize every field of optics and photonics, suggesting innovative solutions to process light beams with unprecedented levels of integrability, high efficiency, and minimal footprint. That included the last frontier of optics: space. Customizing the spatial distribution of the optical degrees of freedom such as intensity, phase, and polarization inspired formidable applications in many areas, from life science to information and communication technology, both at the classical and single-photon regimes. Optical beams with uncommon phase and intensity gradients are exploited in particle tweezing and manipulation, high-resolution microscopy, lithography, holography, and imaging, while orthogonal spatial configurations are used to enhance the information capacity of optical links or expand the Hilbert state space in quantum information. That requires the design of new optical elements for the control and manipulation of light beams, in combination with new fabrication technologies for their implementation and integration into existing platforms. To this aim, advanced planar optics such as metasurfaces, also combined with special diffractive optics and tunable liquid crystals, may represent the enabling solution to accelerate the technological transfer and application of such techniques into real scenarios.

The Research Topic aims to collect the state-of-the-art in flat optics engineering for light structuring and advanced applications. High-quality Original Research, Review, and Perspective articles in this thematic are all welcome.
Research interests include but are not limited to the following areas:
- new theory or physical mechanism for metasurfaces or metamaterials design
- new materials for metasurfaces/metamaterials
- Pancharatnam-Berry optics
- active or reconfigurable metasurfaces
- plasmonic, dielectric or hybrid metasurfaces
- nonlinear metasurfaces
- Dual-functional metasurfaces
- Topological metasurfaces and metaphotonics
- Metasurface integration
- special diffractive optics or liquid-crystals planar devices
- metasurface-inspired optical elements or devices

Applications may include but are not limited to
- beam shaping in the UV, visible, infrared and THz regimes
- singular optics, scalar and vectorial vortices, and caustics
- complex polarization manipulation
- particle tweezing and manipulation
- high-resolution microscopy and imaging
- optical processing and computation: routing, switching, machine-learning, neural networks
- holograms and display, such as 3D display, virtual/augmented reality
- sensing, probing, and detection
- free-space and optical fibre communication
- spatial and mode-division multiplexing/demultiplexing
- quantum-key distribution and quantum information
- quantum sensing and imaging
- LiDAR and structured illumination
- Laser wavefront shaping

Keywords: Metamaterials, Metasurfaces, Diffractive Optics, Flat Optics, Beam Shaping, Optical Manipulation

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