Dynamic beam steering with all-dielectric electro-optic III-V multiple-quantum-well metasurfaces

Year: 2019

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11598-8

PMCID: PMC6692380

Tunable metasurfaces enable dynamical control of the key constitutive properties of light at a subwavelength scale. To date, electrically tunable metasurfaces at near-infrared wavelengths have been realized using free carrier modulation, and switching of thermo-optical, liquid crystal and phase change media. However, the highest performance and lowest loss discrete optoelectronic modulators exploit the electro-optic effect in multiple-quantum-well heterostructures. Here, we report an all-dielectric active metasurface based on electro-optically tunable III–V multiple-quantum-wells patterned into subwavelength elements that each supports a hybrid Mie-guided mode resonance. The quantum-confined Stark effect actively modulates this volumetric hybrid resonance, and we observe a relative reflectance modulation of 270% and a phase shift from 0° to ~70°. Additionally, we demonstrate beam steering by applying an electrical bias to each element to actively change the metasurface period, an approach that can also realize tunable metalenses, active polarizers, and flat spatial light modulators.