Dielectric Metalens by Multilayer Nanoimprint Lithography and Solution Phase Epitaxy

Metasurfaces have ushered in a huge development for their superior ability in manipulating light properties including phase, amplitude, and polarization, which show great potential as alternatives for the refractive optical devices. Recently, many applications of metasurface including metalens have been proposed and investigated, aiming at substituting their refractive counterparts. However, the commonly used fabrication approaches employ electron-beam lithography (EBL) followed by dry etching or atomic layer deposition (ALD) of dielectric materials, which are expensive and inefficient. Besides, dry etching of dielectric materials at sub-100 nm scale with a high aspect ratio is challenging. Herein, a new approach for dielectric metalens fabrication is presented, which combines multilayer nanoimprint lithography and solution phase epitaxy. High aspect ratio ZnO nanopillars with a height-to-diameter ratio of over 7:1 are demonstrated. By using the multilayer nanoimprint lithography, increased aspect ratio nanostructures from shallow imprinting molds are obtained. The highly anisotropic growth characteristic enables nanopillars to grow at a height that exceeds the resist thickness. With this ability, ZnO metalenses are fabricated where the height of nanopillar reaches 1.1 mu m, achieving a focusing efficiency of 50%. The process is cost-effective with a high throughput, which can be widely used for many optical applications.