Design of multilayer Huygens’ metasurfaces for large-area multiwavelength and polarization- insensitive metalenses

Metalenses, advanced nanostructured alternatives to conventional lenses, significantly enhance the compactness and functionality of optical systems. Despite progress in monochromatic applications, scaling metalenses to centimeter-sized apertures for broadband or multiwavelength use remains challenging due to limitations in achieving the necessary group delay (GD) with current materials. In this study, we introduce a multiwavelength, polarization-insensitive metalens design operating in the near-infrared (NIR). Our approach employs multiple Huygens' metasurface layers, each optimized to modulate a specific wavelength while maintaining high transmittance and minimal phase disturbance at other wavelengths. We demonstrate a metalens operating at 2000 and 2340 nm with a numerical aperture (NA) of 0.11. In simulation, the metalens achieves a normalized modulation transfer function (MTF) that is close to diffraction-limited. The absolute focusing efficiencies are 65% and 56%, corresponding to relative efficiencies of 76% and 65% compared to an ideal lens of the same dimensions. The meta-atoms are designed using an inverse shape-optimization method that ensures a high tolerance to layer misalignment and enables the metasurface layers to be fabricated individually and then simply assembled into the final device. This innovative approach is also generalizable to arbitrary multiwavelength phase profiles, beyond that of simple lensing.