The compact, sensitive, and multidimensional displacement measurement device plays a crucial role in semiconductor manufacture and high-resolution optical imaging. The metasurface offers a promising solution to develop high-precision displacement metrology. In this work, we proposed and experimentally demonstrated a two-dimensional displacement (XZ) measurement device by a dielectric metasurface. Both transversal and longitudinal displacements of the metasurface can be obtained by the analysis of the interference optical intensity that is generated by the deflected light beams while the metasurface is under linearly polarized incidence. We experimentally demonstrated that displacements down to 5.4 nm along the x-axis and 0.12 µm along the z-axis can be resolved with a 900 µm × 900 µm metasurface. Our work opens up new possibilities to develop a compact high-precision multidimensional displacement sensor.

Phase carried by two orthogonal polarizations can be manipulated independently by controlling both the geometric size and orientation of the dielectric nanopost. With this characteristic, we demonstrate a novel multifunctional metasurface, which converts part of the incident linearly polarized light into its cross-polarization and encodes the phase of the two orthogonal polarizations independently. A beam splitter and a bifocal metalens were realized in a single-layer dielectric metasurface by this approach. We fabricated the bifocal metalens and demonstrated that two focal spots in orthogonal polarizations can be separated transversely or longitudinally at will. The proposed approach shows a new route to design multifunctional metasurfaces with various applications in holography and three-dimensional display.

The interference of optically induced electric and magnetic resonances in high-refractive-index dielectric nanoparticles provides a new approach to control and shape the scattering patterns of light in the field of nanophotonics. In this Letter, we spectrally tune the electric and magnetic resonances by varying the geometry of a single isolated lead telluride (PbTe) dielectric nanocube. Then, we overlap the electric dipole resonance and magnetic dipole resonance to suppress backward scattering and enhance forward scattering in the resonance region. Furthermore, a broadband unidirectional scattering is achieved by structuring the dielectric nanocuboids as a trimer antenna.

The nonlocal effect on the spontaneous emission of a silver cuboid dimer is investigated using a local analog model. Magnetic as well as electric dipole excitations are introduced to excite different gap modes. The nonlocal response of electric and magnetic modes on various parameters of gap (width and refractive index) are investigated. Unidirectional radiation is achieved by the interaction between electric and magnetic modes in both local and nonlocal models. Compared to local simulations, the resonant wavelength is blue shifted and the spontaneous emission enhancement is weakened in the nonlocal model. The relative shifts of the resonant wavelengths get larger in smaller gaps with a higher refractive index.