What is a Metalens?

Designing a metalens with millions of variables is a uniquely challenging task. You must meet multiple specifications, including achromaticity, large field of view and polarization behaviour with a few elements. As explained in the work of Prof. Federico Capasso’s group [1], metalens design has traditionally been done manually and requires extensive design experience and a deep understanding of fundamental physics.

To design a metalens, a user would need to specify the set of lenses and its parameters in the optical system, as well as the desired target patterns and focus lengths.

In the traditional manual design approach, a deep understanding of physics and significant design experience is needed.

For a semi-automatic multi-domain approach, there is still tremendous manual work to lay out metalenses.

Now a fully automated tool with inverse design capability has been developed so that designers at all levels of expertise can create novel metalens designs quickly and easily. The key design-enabling features of the MetaOptic Designer tool include its ability to simultaneously consider multiple design goals incorporating different launch/ target fields and performance metrics in the context of mixed optical systems composed of multiple metasurface and conventional lenses. The efficient optimization and simulation algorithms generate accurate results, validated by a rigorous finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method and the powerful and user-friendly features significantly reduce design-to-validation cycles.[1]