Generation of Spin‐Dependent Accelerating Beam with Geometric Metasurface

Abstract Airy beam holds great promise for wide applications because of its unique features of being diffraction‐free, self‐accelerating, and self‐healing. Much efforts are devoted to develop concise and efficient methods to generate and manipulate accelerating Airy beams. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to generate single or paired Airy beams by encoding the geometric phase of dielectric metasurface. Cubic phase, together with a linearly gradient phase, is imposed on the metasurface to control the acceleration and initial launching velocity of accelerating Airy beams. Spin‐dependent geometric phase facilitates the generation of spin‐dependent Airy beams by simply controlling the polarization of incident light. High quality of the generated Airy beam is testified by characterization of its diffraction‐free, self‐accelerating, and self‐healing propagation. Despite the loss for silicon in visible region, generation efficiency as high as 63% is achieved for the metasurface Airy beam generator. The results demonstrate the possibility to manipulate complex structured optical field with all‐dielectric metasurface and broaden the potential application of Airy beams into compact and integrated systems.