Tunable “Metasurface’ is Akin to Optical Swiss Army Knife

Date posted
Funding Agency
(Funded by the U.S. Department of Defense)

MIT engineers and colleagues report important new advances on a tunable metasurface, or flat optical device patterned with nanoscale structures, that they compare to a Swiss army knife while its passive predecessor can be thought of as just one tool, like a flat-bladed screwdriver. The new material, composed of germanium, selenium, antimony, and tellurium (GSST), is key to the new metasurface. The metasurface is a film of GSST only about half a millimeter square patterned with some 100,000 nanoscale structures which allow for control over the propagation of light.