本文针对液晶透镜在变焦眼镜方面的应用，研制完成了具有取向转换膜的偏振无关的模式控制液晶透镜。首先通过仿真，论证了采用取向转换膜实现偏振无关的模式控制液晶透镜的可行性，接着在实验中研究并优化了取向转换膜的制备参数，最后完成了偏振无关的液晶透镜的制备。测试结果表明，8 mm孔径大小的液晶透镜具有偏振无关的特性，同时具有变焦调节特性，实现了0~1.590 D的屈光度调节。

Metalenses are expected to play an increasingly important role in miniaturized and integrated optical imaging components/systems. However, devising broadband achromatic metalenses with high focusing efficiencies is still quite challenging. In this work, we proposed an aperture-shared partition phase cooperative manipulation approach for designing a high-efficiency broadband achromatic metalens composed of two concentric sub-metalenses. As a proof-of-concept, an achromatic polarization-independent metalens is successfully designed for the visible and near-infrared range from 450 nm to 1400 nm with the focusing efficiency over 70% for the wavelength range of 600 nm to 1400 nm. The approach reported here provides a possibility for designing a high-performance metalens, which has great potential applications in integrated optics.

A retroreflector that reflects light along its incident direction has found numerous applications in photonics, but the available metasurface schemes suffer from the issue of narrow bandwidth and/or a single angle of incidence. Here, a retroreflector using double layers of achromatic gradient metasurfaces is reported, which can realize retroreflection over a continuous range of incidence angles within a wide spectral band. The first metasurface serves as a transmissive achromatic lens that performs a broadband spatial Fourier transform and its inverse, while the second metasurface works as a reflective achromatic lens that undergoes wavelength- and position-dependent phase dispersions. Using this design strategy, a near-infrared retroreflector comprised of silicon nanopillars with the cross sections of square pillars and square holes is numerically demonstrated, providing a high-performance retroreflection for polarization-independent incident light waves over a continuous range of incidence angles from 0° to 16° within an extremely broad wavelength range between 1.35 and 1.95 μm. The scheme herein can offer a design strategy of broadband retroreflectors and impact numerous photonics applications.

An encapsulated metal-dielectric reflective grating is presented for broadband polarization-independent two-port beam splitting under normal incidence at the central wavelength of 800 nm. Different from traditional two-port grating splitters in the resonant region, this grating splitter is capable of separating light energy into ±1^st orders with high efficiency in a broad waveband for both TE and TM polarizations. A unified method is proposed here for designing this grating splitter, which enables one to choose a grating structure quickly to realize an ultrabroad working waveband. The simulation results indicate that a bandwidth of 46.4 nm could be achieved for diffraction efficiency (defined as the ratio of the light energy diffracted only at the first order to the incident light energy) over 46% at the central wavelength of 800 nm. Moreover, the parameters of the grating structure can be flexibly adjusted with wavelengths using the unified method for various other applications, such as augmented reality, optical interconnections for computing, coherent beam combination, and complex vector beam shaping.

In this Letter, we propose a broadband near-infrared (NIR) absorber based on the phase transition material VO₂. By designing different arrangements of the VO₂ square lattice at high and low temperatures on fused silica substrates, the absorption rate reaches more than 90% in the entire 1.4–2.4 μm range. Using a finite-difference time-domain simulation method and thermal field analysis, the results prove that the absorber is polarization-independent and has wide-angle absorption for incident angles of 0°–70°. The proposed absorber has a smoother absorption curve and is superior in performance, and it has many application prospects in remote sensing geology.