A groundbreaking advancement in optical technology promises to revolutionize the way portable devices manipulate light, potentially transforming applications ranging from smartphone cameras to unmanned drones and satellite imaging. Researchers have developed a novel multilayer metalens design capable of focusing multiple wavelengths of unpolarized light over a large aperture, breaking through the constraints that have long limited the functionality of traditional metalenses. This innovation offers a pathway to creating ultrathin, compact, and efficient lenses that challenge the dimensions and performance of conventional optics.
Metalenses, miniature flat lenses engineered at the nanoscale, have been celebrated for their extraordinary thinness—often thousands of times thinner than a human hair—and their ability to tailor light behavior in ways impossible with bulk optics. Despite these advantages, a significant hurdle has been the intrinsic trade-offs in focusing multiple colors of light simultaneously, particularly when using a single-layer metasurface. Physical limits on group delay, numerical aperture, and device diameter have confined metalenses to narrow operating conditions, limiting practical applications where broadband or multicolor imaging is essential.
Joshua Jordaan, a PhD student and lead author from the Australian National University’s Research School of Physics, explains that prior attempts to engineer single-layer metalenses for broader spectral ranges faltered due to fundamental physical boundaries. “The maximum group delay a single-layer metasurface can achieve imposes strict constraints on the product of numerical aperture, physical diameter, and operating bandwidth,” Jordaan said. This means that trying to focus multiple wavelengths with a single, thin layer either results in minuscule lens sizes or poor focusing efficiency, making such designs unsuitable for real-world devices.
To transcend this limitation, the research team embraced a multilayer metasurface approach. By stacking multiple ultra-thin metamaterial layers, each precisely designed to handle specific wavelengths, they circumvented the bottlenecks inherent in single-layer configurations. This innovative architecture allows the metalens to maintain a relatively large diameter while focusing light across several discrete wavelengths, enhancing the lens’s versatility for practical optical applications.
Central to this breakthrough is an advanced inverse design algorithm powered by shape optimization techniques. Unlike traditional trial-and-error methods, this computational approach explores a vast design space with many degrees of freedom, guiding the formation of complex nanostructures that achieve desired electromagnetic responses. The software searches for metasurface geometries that induce resonant behaviors in both electric and magnetic dipoles—so-called Huygens resonances—which are pivotal for controlling the phase and amplitude of transmitted light with high precision.
The resulting library of metamaterial shapes is surprisingly diverse, featuring nanoscale elements shaped as rounded squares, four-leaf clovers, and propellers. Each of these approximately 300 nanometers tall and 1000 nanometers wide structures produces precise phase shifts ranging from zero to two pi radians, enabling the construction of intricate phase gradient maps essential for tailored light focusing patterns. Although the initial objective was to mimic conventional lens functions such as simple ring-shaped focal zones, the platform’s flexibility suggests possibilities for advanced optical functionalities, including wavelength-specific color routing.
Another remarkable aspect of the design is its polarization insensitivity. Traditional metalenses often suffer performance degradation when illuminated with unpolarized light, limiting their deployment in real-world lighting conditions where the polarization of light is uncontrolled. The multilayer Huygens’ metasurfaces developed by this team overcome this challenge, maintaining consistent focusing behavior irrespective of the light’s polarization state. This feature significantly broadens the metalens’s applicability in consumer electronics and imaging systems.
Despite these accomplishments, the team notes some constraints inherent to the multilayer approach. The number of distinct wavelengths focusable by such lenses is capped at around five due to diffraction considerations and the physical size required for resonance at longer wavelengths. Structures must be large enough to resonate properly at the longest wavelength; however, ensuring that shorter wavelengths do not diffract excessively imposes an upper limit on complexity. Nevertheless, this trade-off still represents a substantial advancement over prior capabilities and is sufficient for numerous multispectral imaging applications.
Joshua Jordaan highlights the potential impact of these metalenses in enhancing the imaging capabilities of lightweight and compact devices. “Our metalenses are ideal for drones or earth-observation satellites,” he explains. “We prioritized minimizing size and weight while maximizing light collection, making them well-suited for portable optical platforms that require high performance without bulk.” This opens exciting prospects for improved aerial surveillance, environmental monitoring, and mobile photography.
Fabrication practicality is another key advantage of the multilayer metalens design. Its low aspect ratio and modular layer construction make the lenses compatible with mature semiconductor nanofabrication processes. Each metamaterial layer can be individually produced and subsequently assembled, streamlining production and promoting scalability. Such manufacturing readiness brings these advanced optics closer to commercial realization, potentially catalyzing widespread adoption.
The international collaboration behind this research, involving the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS), demonstrates the global effort to push the boundaries of nanophotonics. Their findings, published in the journal Optics Express, offer a compelling vision for the future of optics: compact, efficient, and highly adaptable lenses that can manipulate light in unprecedented ways.
This pioneering work not only advances the fundamental understanding of metasurface physics but also lays the groundwork for next-generation optical devices that integrate seamlessly into everyday technology. As metalenses become more versatile, cost-effective, and manufacturable at scale, they promise to revolutionize diverse fields—from personal electronics and autonomous aerial vehicles to spaceborne Earth observation systems—ushering in a new era of optical innovation.
Subject of Research:
Not applicable
Article Title:
Design of multilayer Huygens’ metasurfaces for large-area multiwavelength and polarization-insensitive metalenses
News Publication Date:
31-Jul-2025
Web References:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OE.564328
Image Credits:
Dr Phil Dooley, ANU
Keywords
Metalenses, multilayer metasurfaces, Huygens resonances, nanophotonics, inverse design, shape optimization, polarization insensitive, broadband optics, metamaterials, computational design, nanofabrication, portable imaging systems
