Toward Large Area Metasurface Fabrication for Augmented Reality Systems

To take advantage of metasurfaces in visualization systems, one of the main challenges is to resolve the question of the manufacturing device surface. Nanosphere self-assembly can be used to define the elementary pattern of periodic metasurfaces on large areas. Combined with soft UV-NIL (nanoimprint lithography), it allows the fabrication and reproduction of large surface structures. As self-assembly can be carried out on different surfaces, this adds flexibility to the manufacturing process: here we compare silver metasurfaces made by soft-UV NIL, with two different ways for PDMS stamps fabrication, both of which use self-assembly of the same polystyrene nanospheres. We describe both processes and their respective impact on the characteristics of the obtained metasurfaces.