Metalens array promotes the scalability of optical addressing

Optical addressing, a technology to focus and align individual addressing beams onto quantum particles, needs integrated, miniatured, and flexible focusing optical elements to realize precise manipulation over quantum states of individual trapped ion or neutral atom. Existing technologies about optical addressing, are limited by the lack of scalability and face challenges in obtaining good focusing properties, such as diffraction-limited focusing spot size, low crosstalk, and high efficiency.

A Research group from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), China, payed their attension to  optical metalens as a solution to optical addressing, which is well known for their compact size, planar structure, and compatibility with CMOS processing. Their idea is to use the scalable metalens array consisting of periodical metalens molecules to focus the incident addressing beam array. In their design, each metalens molecule includes five metalenses spatially arranged in a “Z” shape with central symmetry, and each metalens is composed of nanopillars on an fused silica substrate. With a “Z” shaped metalens molecule incorporating both on-axis and off axis metalens, focused spot spacing can be much smaller than the spacing between two neighboring metalenses, even arbitrarily arranged focused spot array can be obtained by proper design. This design has distinct advantages for optical addressing applications, as spacing between trapped ions can be very compact, and more ions can be manipulated at a same time by just adding more metalens molecules.

Researchers successfully designed metalens arrays for x linearly polarized and left circularly polarized light respectively. The resuls show that they can focus collimated addressing beam array into a compact focused spot array with a uniform spot spacing of 5 μm, featuring a low crosstalk of less than 0.82%.

Researchers believe that their design might be helpful to promote the development of integrated trapped-ion quantum computers and give some inspiration in the design of metalens for optical addressing applications.. The work entitled “Design of scalable metalens array for optical addressing” was published on Frontiers of Optoelectronics (published on August. 4, 2022).

###

Reference: Tie Hu, Xing Feng, Zhenyu Yang, Ming Zhao. Design of scalable metalens array for optical addressing. Front. Optoelectron. 15, 32 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12200-022-00035-2

About Higher Education Press

Founded in May 1954, Higher Education Press Limited Company (HEP), affiliated with the Ministry of Education, is one of the earliest institutions committed to educational publishing after the establishment of P. R. China in 1949. After striving for six decades, HEP has developed into a major comprehensive publisher, with products in various forms and at different levels. Both for import and export, HEP has been striving to fill in the gap of domestic and foreign markets and meet the demand of global customers by collaborating with more than 200 partners throughout the world and selling products and services in 32 languages globally. Now, HEP ranks among China’s top publishers in terms of copyright export volume and the world’s top 50 largest publishing enterprises in terms of comprehensive strength.

The Frontiers Journals series published by HEP includes 28 English academic journals, covering the largest academic fields in China at present. Among the series, 13 have been indexed by SCI, 6 by EI, 2 by MEDLINE, 1 by A&HCI. HEP’s academic monographs have won about 300 different kinds of publishing funds and awards both at home and abroad.

About Frontiers of Optoelectronics

Frontiers of Optoelectronics (FOE) aims at introducing the most recent research results and the cutting edge improvements in the area of photonics and optoelectronics. It is dedicated to be an important information platform for rapid communication and exchange between researchers in the related areas. The journal publishes review articles, research articles, letters, comments, special issues, and so on. The Editors-in-Chief are Academician Qihuang Gong from Peking University and Prof. Xinliang Zhang from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. FOE has been indexed by ESCI, Ei, SCOPUS, DOAJ, CSCD, Source Journals for Chinese Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations, etc. FOE is fully open access since 2022.