Design framework for polarization-insensitive multifunctional achromatic metalenses

Controlling the wavefront of light, especially on a subwavelength scale, is pivotal in modern optics. Metasurfaces present a unique platform for realizing flat lenses, called metalenses, with thicknesses on the order of the wavelength. Despite substantial effort, however, suppressing the chromatic aberrations over large operational bandwidths of metalenses still remains a challenge. Here, we develop a systematic design method enabling a simultaneous, polarization-insensitive control of the phase and the group delay of a light beam based on libraries of transmission-mode dielectric meta-elements. Mid-infrared achromatic metalenses are designed and theoretically analyzed to have diffraction-limited focal spots with vanishing chromatic aberrations in the operating wavelength range of 6–8.5 μm, while maintaining high focusing efficiencies of 41% on average. The proposed methodology, which can be used as a general design rule for all spectra, also provides a versatile design scheme for ultrashort pulse focusing and achromatic vortex-beam generation (orbital angular momentum), representing a major advance toward practical implementations of functional metalenses.