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Thanks to their giant, yet tunable, Q-factor resonances, all-dielectric metasurfaces supporting the quasi-bound states in the continuum (q-BIC) resonances are well-suited to provide a promising platform for quantum-coherent light–matter interactions. Yet, the strong coupling regime, characterized by the hybrid light–matter states – polaritons, has not yet been fully explored in the mid-infrared regime. This paper investigates the parameter space of vibrational strong coupling (VSC) between material and metasurface cavities supporting q-BIC resonances in the mid-infrared spectral range. We outline the effects of transition dipole strength, damping rate, and the number of molecules coupled to a single cavity, as well as the cavity damping rates, to understand their respective impacts on VSC. By tuning the Q-factor of the metasurface and material parameters, a new transition light–matter coupling zone is introduced, bridging the gap between weak and strong coupling, where polaritons form but their linewidths prohibit their spectral identification. The study further identifies the effects of cavity linewidth on polariton peak separability in strongly coupled systems, highlighting that the cavities with smaller nonradiative losses and narrower linewidths facilitate better polariton separability. Moreover, we found that matching cavity and material loss, satisfying the critical strong coupling condition, enhances the coupling strength between cavity and material. Overall, these findings can guide the design of photonic cavities suited for VSC experiments, contributing to the burgeoning fields of polaritonic chemistry, light-mediated modulation of chemical reactivity, and highly sensitive molecular spectroscopy.

We experimentally demonstrate the tuning of accidental bound states in the continuum (A-BICs) in silicon nanodisk arrays. The A-BIC emerges of the destructive interference of multipoles, which are the dominating out-of-plane electric dipole and in-plane magnetic dipole, and weak electric quadrupole and magnetic quadrupole. We further show that the spectral and angular position of the A-BIC can be conveniently tuned by varying the nanodisk size or the lattice period. Remarkably, the angular position can be tuned even to 0°, suggesting an interesting transition of the A-BIC from an off-Γ-BIC to an at-Γ-BIC. Our work provides a new strategy for light trapping with high quality factors, and the obtained tunable A-BICs can find potential applications in low-threshold lasing, enhanced nonlinear optics, and optical sensing.

The metasurface refractive index sensor has a high degree of tunability and flexibility, providing excellent performance for high precision refractive index sensing applications. The metasurface absorber with metallic structure has been hindered in further sensor applications due to the inherent Ohmic loss of the metallic material. In this study, a dual nanorod metasurface structure based on semiconductor Si was designed, introducing a symmetry-breaking structure to excite dual ultra-narrow q-BIC resonance peaks with Fano line shapes. Both peaks are located in the near-infrared region, and multipole analysis shows that this strong field enhancement effect is induced by a magnetic dipole. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of this sensor to provide dual-channel detection while achieving high sensitivity and high Q-factor. We believe that this device exhibits outstanding performance and high practicality, providing a reference for the development and application of biological and environmental sensors.

2D materials such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) are a new class of atomic-layer materials possessing optical and electric properties that significantly depend on the number of layers. Electronic transitions can be manipulated in artificial resonant electromagnetic (EM) fields using metasurfaces and other designed nanostructures. Here, we demonstrate prominently resonant enhancement in the photoluminescence (PL) of atomic monolayer, WS2, doped with a small quantity of Mo. The excitonic PL showed a strong enhancement effect on a higher-order magnetic resonance of all-dielectric metasurfaces consisting of periodic arrays of Si nanopellets. The PL intensity witnessed a 300-fold enhancement compared to the reference PL intensity on a flat silicon dioxide (SiO2) layer, which suggests a drastic change in the dynamics of photoexcited states. Confocal PL microscopy and the analysis revealed that the single photons were coherently emitted from the TMDC monolayer on the metasurface. Furthermore, examining the PL lifetime in the ps and ns timescales clarified two exponential components at the prominent exciton PL: a short-time component decaying in 22 ps and a long-time component lasting over 10 ns. Therefore, we can infer that the radiative components were significantly activated in the TMDC monolayer on the metasurfaces in comparison to the reference monolayer on a flat SiO2 layer.

We propose and numerically demonstrate high Q-factor sensors based on all-dielectric metasurfaces, which are very sensitive to the change of the refractive index of the surrounding media and the incident angle. By using the light incident angular scanning method, the all-dielectric metasurface based on symmetric tetramer can act as an excellent sensing platform for trace-amount molecules such as protein A/G, 2, 4-DNT, and 2D material graphene with huge absorbance enhancement in the mid-infrared broadband spectrums. The results reveal that envelope of absorbance amplitudes is in good agreement with the vibrational mode of molecules, and absorbance enhancement factors reach as high as 10 dB in the mid-infrared wavelength range from 5.75 to 6.80 μm. To further increase the Q-factor of the resonances, the all-dielectric metasurface based on asymmetric tetramer is investigated. This asymmetric structure can induce toroidal and magnetic dipoles governed by quasi-BIC to produce multi-extremely narrow linewidth Fano resonances, and the maximum sensitivity reaches up to 1.43 μm/RIU. Therefore, the proposed all-dielectric metasurface demonstrates highly enhanced performance in refractive index and chemical information sensing for trace-amount biomolecules, which inspires the development of new high-sensitivity refractive index sensors for the nondestructive identification in the mid-infrared regime.

One compound metasurface with multiple functions and precise complex amplitude modulation is beneficial to photonic integration. Here, all-silicon bifunctional metasurfaces capable of independent amplitude and phase modulation in two circular polarized channels are proposed, which encode complex amplitude information by integrating propagation phase and Pancharatnam-Berry phase. A switchable power-controllable axial bifocal metalens directly illustrates the feasibility of the proposed modulation scheme. Another switchable power-controllable horizontal/vertical bifocal metalens characterizes the versatility and flexibility of this approach. The experimental results agree well with the simulations and theoretical expectations. In addition, we also discuss the broadband performance of the proposed metalens and the dynamic focusing behavior under optical pumping. The proposed approach can directly generate editable amplitude and phase profiles and can find applications in dynamic holography, dynamic display, and other fields.

Toroidal dipole (TD) with weak coupling to the electromagnetic fields offers tremendous potential for advanced design of photonic devices. However, the excitation of high quality (Q) factor TD resonances in these devices is challenging. Here, we investigate ultrahigh-Q factor TD resonances at terahertz frequencies arising from a distortion of symmetry-protected bound states in the continuum (BIC) in all-dielectric metasurface consisting of an array of high-index tetramer clusters. By elaborately arranging the cylinders forming an asymmetric cluster, two distinct TD resonances governed by BIC are excited and identified. One is distinguished as intracluster TD mode that occurs in the interior of tetramer cluster, and the other one is intercluster TD mode that arises from the two neighboring clusters. Such TD resonances can be turned into ultrahigh-Q leaky resonances by controlling the asymmetry of cluster. The low-loss TD resonances with extremely narrow linewidth are very sensitive to the change in the refractive index of the surrounding media, achieving ultrahigh sensitivity level of 489 GHz/RIU. These findings will open up an avenue to develop ultrasensitive photonic sensor in the terahertz regime.

Metamaterials can achieve superior electromagnetic properties over natural materials by adjusting the structure of the meta-atoms. Chiral metamaterials have been widely used in circular dichroism (CD) spectra, polarization imaging, and optical sensing. Here we propose a kind of all-silicon coding metasurfaces to achieve the function similar to chirality by spin decoupling. One of the two circularly polarized (CP) channels is scattered randomly, and the desired function is only designed in the other opposite CP channel. Three kinds of coding metasurfaces are designed to verify the reliability of such approach: one simultaneously possessing dual function of transmitting directly and scattering randomly, one capable of generating the superposition state of vortex beam, and the other generating the Bessel vortex beam, respectively. And some experimental verifications are carried out. This scheme is simpler and more versatile than previous schemes which require elaborate designed structure of the meta-atoms. Our novel approach provides a new option for implementing tunable chirality.

Cylindrical vector beams (CVBs), being a special kind of beams with spatially variant states of polarizations, are promising in photonics applications, including high-resolution imaging, plasmon excitation, optical trapping, and laser machining. Recently, generating CVBs using metasurfaces has drawn enormous interest owing to their highly designable, multifunctional, and integratable features. However, related studies remain unexplored in the terahertz regime. Here, a generic method for efficiently generating terahertz CVBs carrying orbital angular momentums (OAMs) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated using transmission-type spatial-variant dielectric metasurfaces, which is realized by designing the interference between the two circularly polarized transmission components. This method is based on spin-decoupled phase control allowed by simultaneously manipulating the dynamic phase and geometric phase of each structure, endowing more degree of freedom in designing the vector beams. Two types of metasurfaces which respectively generate polarization-dependent terahertz vector vortex beams (VVBs) and vector Bessel beams (VBBs) are experimentally characterized. The proposed method opens a new window to generate versatile vector beams, providing new capabilities in developing novel, compact, and high-performance devices applicable to broad electromagnetic spectral regimes.

The development of all-dielectric metasurfaces vigorously prompts the applications of optical metasurfaces for the visible and near-IR light range. Compared to IR or longer wavelength light, visible and near-IR light have shorter wavelengths. As a result, surface roughness and imperfections of all-dielectric metasurfaces have larger scattering or absorption of visible and near-IR light, thereby directly affecting the performance of an all-dielectric metasurface. In this article, a volume-current method is adopted to study the effect of metasurface roughness. Numerical calculations based on the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method are also used to study the relationship between the effects of metasurface roughness and the optical resonant modes. Numerical predictions based on our theoretical studies fit the experimental data well. Further, the effect of different roughness levels on the all-dielectric metasurface performance is predicted. More importantly, a method utilizing resonant-mode engineering to enhance the metasurface performance (e.g. incident angle insensitivity) is also proposed and demonstrated. This work deepens our understanding of the working mechanism of all-dielectric metasurfaces and paves the way for their use in a broad spectrum of applications.

High-index dielectric nanostructures have emerged as an appealing complement to plasmonic nanostructures, offering similar light management capabilities at the nanoscale but free from the inherent optical losses. Despite the great interest in these all-dielectric architectures, their fabrication still requires cumbersome fabrication techniques that limit their implementation in many applications. Hence, the great interest in alternative scalable procedures. Among those, the fabrication of silicon spheres is at the forefront, with several routes available in the literature. However, the exploitation of the Mie modes sustained by these silicon resonators is limited over large areas by polydispersity or a lack of long-range order. Here, we present an all-dielectric metamaterial fabricated with a low cost and highly scalable technique: a combination of soft imprinting nanolithography and chemical vapor deposition. The resulting all-dielectric metasurface is composed of an array of silicon hemispheres on top of a high refractive index dielectric substrate. This architecture allows the exploitation of high-quality Mie resonances at a large scale due to the high monodispersity of the hemispheres organized in a single crystal two-dimensional lattice. The optical response of the metasurface can be engineered by the design parameters of the nanoimprinted structure. We further demonstrate the potential of this platform to enhance light emission by coupling dye molecules to the sustained Mie resonances and measuring both an eight-fold amplified signal and a triple lifetime reduction.