Airy optical beams have emerged to hold enormous theoretical and experimental research interest due to their outstanding characteristics. Conventional approaches suffer from bulky and costly systems, as well as poor phase discretization. The newly developed metasurface-based Airy beam generators have constraints of polarization dependence or limited generation efficiency. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a polarization-independent silicon dielectric metasurface for generation of high-efficiency Airy optical beams. In our implementation, rather than synchronous manipulation of the amplitude and phase by plasmonic or Huygens’ metasurfaces, we employ and impose a 3/2 phase-only manipulation to the dielectric metasurface, consisting of an array of silicon nanopillars with an optimized transmission efficiency as high as 97%. The resultant Airy optical beams possess extraordinarily large deflection angles and relatively narrow beam widths. Our validated scheme will open up a fascinating doorway to broaden the application scenarios of Airy optical beams on ultracompact photonic platforms.

In this paper, we report an experimental demonstration of enabling technology exploiting resonant properties of plasmonic nanoparticles, for the realization of wavelength-sensitive ultra-minituarized (4 μm×4 μm) optical metadevices. To this end, the example of a 1.3/1.6 μm wavelength demultiplexer is considered. Its technological implementation is based on the integration of gold cut-wire-based metalines on the top of a silicon-on-insulator waveguide. The plasmonic metalines modify locally the effective index of the Si waveguide and thus allow for the implementation of wavelength-dependent optical pathways. The 1.3/1.6 μm wavelength separation with extinction ratio between two demultiplexers’ channels reaching up to 20 dB is experimentally demonstrated. The considered approach, which can be readily adapted to different types of material planar lightwave circuit platforms and nanoresonators, is suited for the implementation of a generic family of wavelength-sensitive guided-wave optical metadevices.