Optical Metasurfaces: Progress and Applications

A metasurface is an artificial nanostructured interface that has subwavelength thickness and that manipulates light by spatially arranged meta-atoms—fundamental building blocks of the metasurface. Those meta-atoms, usually consisting of plasmonic or dielectric nanoantennas, can directly change light properties such as phase, amplitude, and polarization. As a derivative of three-dimensional (3D) metamaterials, metasurfaces have been emerging to tackle some of the critical challenges rooted in traditional metamaterials, such as high resistive loss from resonant plasmonic components and fabrication requirements for making 3D nanostructures. In the past few years, metasurfaces have achieved groundbreaking progress, providing unparalleled control of light, including constructing arbitrary wave fronts and realizing active and nonlinear optical effects. This article provides a systematic review of the current progress in and applications of optical metasurfaces, as well as an overview of metasurface building blocks based on plasmonic resonances, Mie resonance, and the Pancharatnam-Berry phase.