Inverse-Designed Meta-Optics with Spectral-Spatial Engineered Response to Mimic Color Perception
This work addresses the problem of advanced optical design for applications like imaging or sensing, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing inverse-design methods in meta-optics.
The researchers tackled the challenge of designing meta-optics that simultaneously focus light and shape spectra without filters, using inverse design to create devices that mimic human color perception functions, with experimental results showing qualitative agreement with predictions.
Meta-optics have rapidly become a major research field within the optics and photonics community, strongly driven by the seemingly limitless opportunities made possible by controlling optical wavefronts through interaction with arrays of sub-wavelength scatterers. As more and more modalities are explored, the design strategies to achieve desired functionalities become increasingly demanding, necessitating more advanced design techniques. Herein, the inverse-design approach is utilized to create a set of single-layer meta-optics that simultaneously focus light and shape the spectra of focused light without using any filters. Thus, both spatial and spectral properties of the meta-optics are optimized, resulting in spectra that mimic the color matching functions of the CIE 1931 XYZ color space, which links the distributions of wavelengths in light and the color perception of a human eye. Experimental demonstrations of these meta-optics show qualitative agreement with the theoretical predictions and help elucidate the focusing mechanism of these devices.