Integrated optical beam steering device using switchable nanoantennas and a reflective metalens.

In this paper, an integrated optical device is proposed in which a reflective meta-lens and five switchable nano-antennas are combined to provide optical beam steering at the standard telecommunication wavelength of 1550 nm. For this purpose, a graphene-based switchable power divider is designed and integrated with nano-antennas to control the flow of the light entering the device. To achieve a higher angular accuracy in the radiated beams, a new algorithm is proposed and utilized to optimize the location of feeding nano-antennas in accordance with the reflective meta-lens. In order to achieve a minimum fluctuation in the light intensity when the beams are rotated in the space, an algorithm is developed to select optimum unit cells for the engineered meta-lens. The whole device is numerically analyzed using Electromagnetic full-wave simulations illustrating an optical beam steering with high accuracy (better than 1 degree) in the beam direction, and a low variation (less than 1 dB) in the radiated light intensity. The proposed integrated device can be used for many applications such as inter- and intra-chip optical interconnects, optical wireless communication systems, and advanced integrated LIDARs.