Diffraction gratings formed by metasurfaces having differently oriented nanobeams

Abstract

Metasurfaces provide compact optical elements in head-mounted display systems to, e.g., incouple light into or outcouple light out of a waveguide. The metasurfaces may be formed by a plurality of repeating unit cells, each unit cell comprising two sets or more of nanobeams elongated in crossing directions: one or more first nanobeams elongated in a first direction and a plurality of second nanobeams elongated in a second direction. As seen in a top-down view, the first direction may be along a y-axis, and the second direction may be along an x-axis. The unit cells may have a periodicity in the range of 10 nm to 1 μm, including 10 nm to 500 nm or 300 nm to 500 nm. Advantageously, the metasurfaces provide diffraction of light with high diffraction angles and high diffraction efficiencies over a broad range of incident angles and for incident light with circular polarization.