Abdoulaye Ndao

Large Scale Metasurface Simulation

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Recently, optical metasurface have attracted plenty of attention due to the potential to revolutionize photonic devices by offering ultrathin properties and multiple functions to wide range of common optical elements, from cloaking devices, waveplates, axicons, and holograms. To be more specific, metasurfaces are two-dimensional arrays of subwavelength structure that alter optical magnitudes, wavefronts, and polarizations. Hence, to simulate metasurfaces, full wave simulation approach such as Finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) or Finite element method (FEM) are usually used. Because of the intrinsic property of the full wave simulation, the size of the metasurface simulations is usually limited within 50μm. On the other hand, ray tracing approach is widely used as geometric optics approximation and it can simulate large scale optical properties (centimeter to even meter scale). This project aims to combine two methods and provide a large scale metasurface simulation platform. The platform will extract the phase profile in full wave simulators and import to ray tracing simulator. It opens a facile way to simulate and model large scale flat optical elements for imaging and display applications.

LABORATORY MENTOR
LiYi Hsu,

RESEARCH GOALS
• Build a simulation platform which enables the simulation of large scale (more than 1000 times of wavelength) optical metasurfaces.
• The platform will apply ray tracing commercial software such as Zemax or FRED and import arbitrary phase profiles of metasurface to simulate optical paths.

LEARNING GOALS
• Use script programs such as MATLAB or Python to connect full wave simulator and ray tracing simulator. Understand the optical properties of different metasurfaces.
• Use the platform he/she built and virtualize the imaging/ display function of the designed optical metasurfaces such as diffraction-limit metalens or large field of view metalens.

Learn more about Abdoulaye Ndao on his faculty page.