Keywords

metasurface, physical optics, hybrid lens, optimization

Abstract

Refractive optics are widely used in imaging systems while optical aberrations can limit their imaging performance and the typical solution to correct is cascading additional refractive optics with varying materials and shapes. Still, this scheme can result in bulky and costly lenses. Metasurfaces (MSs), with their compactness and ability to locally manipulate wavefronts, offer additional degrees of freedom in aberration correction. Integrating MSs with refractive optics creates MS-refractive hybrid lenses, enabling advanced optical performance while maintaining a compact design. Various methods have been proposed for designing aberration-correcting MSs in hybrid lenses, which often rely on predefined target phase profiles or basis function expansions. However, these approaches typically neglect critical factors such as polarization-dependent responses and phase dispersion inherent to MS meta-atoms. This dissertation presents a framework for designing and optimizing MS-refractive hybrid lenses, incorporating physical optics modeling to overcome these limitations. A key contribution is the implementation of an adjoint optimization method, allowing free-form optimization of all MS parameters to minimize image spot size across multiple field angles and wavelengths. To enable this optimization, a ray-wave hybrid propagation method is developed for scalar fields, providing accurate field propagation through refractive optics. Furthermore, this work extends hybrid lens design to vector field modeling, introducing a vector field physical optics propagation scheme to analyze polarization effects. This capability is essential for designing hybrid lenses with polarization-sensitive MSs or coated refractive surface. Several examples are presented to demonstrate the proposed method’s versatility, including hybrid lenses (1) designed to generate and focus cylindrically polarized beams, (2) incorporating multifunctional MSs developed through adjoint gradient optimization, and (3) for full-Stokes polarization sensing.

Completion Date

2025

Semester

Spring

Committee Chair

Renshaw, C. Kyle

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Optics and Photonics

Department

Optics and Photonics

Identifier

DP0029394

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Campus Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

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