Ultralow sidelobe midinfrared optical phased array based on a broadband metasurface.

In this paper, we propose an all-solid-state and ultralow sidelobe optical phased array (OPA) through designing a broadband angle-insensitive reflective metasurface in the midinfrared. The simulation results show that the metasurface can realize the wide-frequency metareflection characteristics in the range of 4.3∼5.0µ. Notably, the metasurface array can almost generate a continuous sweep between 0° and 342°, while the variation of reflectivity amplitude is only 10.2%, by changing the corresponding structural parameters. Then, we design and simulate an OPA based on these excellent characteristics of the broadband metasurface. By simply changing the periodicity of the OPA structure, the continuous deflection angles can be achieved within 29.41°, which can increase to 44.06° by changing the angle of the incident beam. A key feature of our design is that the sidelobe energy is less than 3.10% of the main lobe energy.