Visible Metalenses with High Focusing Efficiency Fabricated Using Nanoimprint Lithography

Metasurfaces enable precise control over the properties of light and hold promise for commercial applications. However, fabricating visible metasurfaces suitable for high-volume production is challenging and requires scalable processes. Nanoimprint lithography is a cost-effective and high-throughput technique that can meet this scalability requirement. This work presents a mask-templating nanoimprint lithography process for fabricating metasurfaces with varying fill factors and negligible wavefront aberrations using composite stamps. As a proof-of-concept, a 6 mm diameter metalens formed of silicon nitride nano-posts with a numerical aperture of 0.2 that operates at 550 nm is demonstrated. The nanoimprinted metalens achieves a peak focusing efficiency of (81 +/- 1)%, comparable to the control metalens made with electron beam lithography with a focusing efficiency of (89 +/- 1)%. Spatially resolved deflection efficiency and wavefront data, which informs design and process optimization, is also presented. These results highlight nanoimprint lithography as a cost-effective, scalable method for visible metasurface fabrication that has potential for widespread adoption in consumer electronics and imaging systems. Due to subwavelength critical dimensions, metasurfaces for visible light are difficult to scalably manufacture. The authors present a scalable manufacturing technique based on nanoimprint lithography (NIL) and demonstrate it by fabricating a 6 mm diameter metalens. Efficiency measurements show that this metalens performs nearly as well as one manufactured using electron beam lithography, validating NIL as a high fidelity manufacturing method.image