Design and Fabrication of a Metalens for Beam Shaping in an End-fire Optical Phased Array

Optical phased array (OPA) devices for beam steering and ranging applications have a characteristics built-in architecture that emanates elliptical beam pattern, mainly due to laterally expanded aperture of their end-fire emitter designs [1]. This leads to poor resolution along the vertical direction (i.e., large vertical divergence) due to optical power dispersion, resulting in a short detection range. Various literature has demonstrated the use of cylindrical lenses to collimate the output beam from OPA devices, enhancing desired functionalities such as output beam properties and detection range [2]. In this work, we try to shape the elliptical beam of 64-channel silica end-fire OPA into a sharp spherical beam by the use of metalens with minimal objective distance for more realistic approach.