Laser scanning using spatiotemporal beam dynamics in metasurfaces (Conference Presentation)

A new methodology is proposed to implement laser beam steering with a wide angle of view and 4-5 orders of magnitude enhancement in scanning speed. It is based on light-matter interaction between metasurfaces and mode-locked lasers with a frequency-comb spectrum (i.e., equally-spaced phased-locked frequency lines). Replacing CW lasers with frequency-comb sources expands the impact of flat metasurfaces towards producing dynamic optical patterns rather than only static patterns in the far-field. A metasurface is judiciously designed to produce the optical pattern of a rotating light beam realizing ultrafast laser scanning with ~90-deg angle-of-view over ~100ps time interval.