The University of Arizona: Metasurface Polarization Optics

OSC Colloquium: Noah Rubin

Metasurfaces are an emergent class of subwavelength diffractive optics. The individual elements comprising a metasurface may be designed with polarization sensitivity – in this way, metasurfaces can enable optical elements whose far-fields exhibit custom polarization-dependence, a new capability in classical optics. Using relatively simple design heuristics based on the Jones calculus, a variety of polarization-dependent optical elements can be realized. In this talk, we discuss these metasurface polarization optics, their historical antecedents, their design, and new polarization sensitive optical elements based on metasurfaces. We demonstrate the use of these metasurface polarization optics in a variety of compact polarization imaging systems, as well as in a recent astrophysics demonstration at an observatory solar telescope. Metasurfaces ideally provide new additions to the traditional toolkit of polarization optics and may soon reach a level of maturity that sees their inclusion in practical optical systems for polarimetric remote sensing and other applications.

Noah Rubin is a new assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD. His research interests lie, broadly, in the role of polarized light in optical systems of all kinds and new technologies for the control and measurement thereof. He was a Research Associate at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, where he also completed his Ph.D. in Applied Physics under Prof. Federico Capasso in 2020. Previously, he earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015.