Recently, the Diamond Optoelectronic Materials and Devices team at our school, in collaboration with Beijing University of Technology and the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology, made new progress in the development of diamond optical metasurfaces. The related work, entitled “Diamond Based Optical Metasurfaces for Broadband Wavefront Shaping in Harsh Environment,” was published in Laser & Photonics Reviews. The first author of this paper is Associate Prof. Xun Yang from our school. The corresponding authors are Prof. Pei-Nan Ni and Prof. Chongxin Shan from our school, and Prof. Yi-Yang Xie from Beijing University of Technology. Zhengzhou University is the first affiliation of this work.
Optical metasurfaces consist of artificially designed nanostructure arrays with thicknesses smaller than the wavelength of light, enabling precise manipulation of optical fields at the subwavelength scale. Over the past decade, optical metasurface technology has developed rapidly and has been demonstrated in many material systems. However, conventional materials are often vulnerable to harsh operating environments, suffering from issues such as poor corrosion resistance, low ultraviolet transmittance, and limited thermal and mechanical stability. These limitations greatly restrict the application of optical metasurface devices under extreme conditions.
Diamond is well known for its excellent material properties and stability, including the highest thermal conductivity in nature, high damage resistance, ultrahigh hardness, and outstanding chemical stability. Therefore, combining diamond materials with metasurface technology is considered highly advantageous for applications in extreme environments. However, the applicability of diamond metasurface devices in harsh environments had not been experimentally verified.
To address this issue, this work designed and fabricated representative diamond metasurface devices for wavefront manipulation, including holographic metasurfaces and deep-ultraviolet metalenses. Based on these devices, the broadband operation of diamond metasurfaces was investigated under high-temperature conditions, acidic and alkaline environments, and mechanical polishing conditions. The results confirm that diamond metasurfaces possess strong potential for broadband operation and extreme-environment applications.
This work not only provides a new approach for realizing diamond nanophotonic devices, but also offers a new strategy for developing metasurface devices capable of complex broadband wavefront manipulation in harsh environments.
