Compact Generation of Airy Beams with C‐Aperture Metasurface

A novel method to launch finite power Airy beams based on a metasurface is presented. By tailoring the amplitude and phase of the transmitted fields from a metallic C‐aperture array, launching Airy beams is achieved in free space. The amplitude and phase of the Airy beam profile can be mapped and tailored by tuning only the tilt angles of the aperture. This structure has multifrequency characteristics, which facilitates Airy beam steering because the trajectory of Airy beams is dependent on the wavelength. In addition, the design method can generate Airy beams which have a very compact main lobe (≈2 µm). Computational and experimental results show that proposed metasurface can overcome some limitations of the traditional methods to generate Airy beams. The results can be used for potential applications in integrated optics, beam shaping, biosensing, and next‐generation holography.