Optical metasurfaces exhibit unprecedented ability in light field control due to their ability to locally change the phase, amplitude, and polarization of transmitted or reflected light. We propose a multifunctional metalens with dual working modes based on bilayer geometric phase elements consisting of low-loss phase change materials (Sb₂Se₃) and amorphous silicon (a-Si). In transmission mode, by changing the crystalline state of the Sb₂Se₃ scatterer, a bifocal metalens with an arbitrary intensity ratio at the telecommunication C-band is realized, and the total focusing efficiency of the bifocal metalens is as high as 78%. Also, at the resonance wavelength of the amorphous Sb₂Se₃ scatterer, the scatterer can be regarded as a half-wave plate in reflection mode. The multifunctional metalens can reversely converge incident light into a focal point with a focusing efficiency of up to 30%. The high focusing efficiency, dynamic reconfigurability, and dual working modes of the multifunctional metalens contribute to polarization state detection, optical imaging, and optical data storage. In addition, the bilayer geometric phase elements can be easily extended to multilayer, which significantly improves the capability of manipulating the incident light field.

Vanadium dioxide (VO₂) is a temperature phase change material that has metallic properties at high temperatures and insulation properties at room temperature. In this article, a novel device has been designed based on the dielectric metasurface consisting of VO₂ and graphene array, which can achieve multiple functions by adjusting temperature and voltage. When the temperature is high (340 K), the device is in the absorption state and its absorptivity can be dynamically controlled by changing the temperature. On the other hand, the device is in the polarization state under room temperature, and the polarization of electromagnetic waves can be dynamically controlled by adjusting the voltage of graphene. This device can achieve a broadband absorber (the maximum absorptance reaches 99.415% at wavelengths ranging from 44 THz to 52 THz) and high polarization conversion efficiency (>99.89%) in the mid-infrared range, which has great advantages over other single-function devices. Our results demonstrate that this multifunctional device may have widespread applications in emitters, sensors, spatial light modulators, IR camouflages, and can be used in thermophotovoltaics and wireless communication.

The atmospheric turbulence (AT) causes distortion of phase fronts of orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams, which hinders the recognition of OAM modes. Convolutional neural network (CNN), a deep learning (DL) technique, can be utilized to realize the effective recognition of OAM modes. In this article, we propose a properly designed six-layer CNN model that can achieve high recognition accuracy (RA) of OAM modes at a reasonable computing complexity. We used intensity images of Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams to train our CNN model and explored the relationship between the RA for different single OAM modes and many factors including the number of training epochs, AT intensity, transmission distance, and the number of single OAM modes. Our CNN model can obtain an RA of 97.1% under moderate turbulence and 80% under strong turbulence, which are better than some CNN models proposed previously. Compared with these previous CNN models, our CNN model can also reduce the time consumption for at most 70%. Our research could contribute in achieving higher data capacity in OAM-based free space optical (FSO) communication systems.

This paper proposes a 32-channel-hybrid-multiplexing system on atmospheric turbulence. With the utilization of the hybrid multiplexing of orbital angular momentum (OAM), polarization, and frequency, the communication speed of the system can be significantly improved, and this system can be well combined with the existing frequency division multiplexing (FDM) optical communication network. Within this communication system, we discuss the effects of different turbulence intensities on the phase, OAM crosstalk, spectrum, and bit error rate (BER) in turbulent channels. Under strong turbulence, 46.8% of the energy leaks to the neighbor OAM and become noise when multiple topological charge states are transmitted. The research reflects the impact of various parameters of the OAM hybrid multiplexing system under turbulence, which is closer to a practical application scenario and is significant for implementing OAM communication in the turbulence channel.

Vortex optical communication has been a hot research field in recent years. A key step is mode recognition in the orbital angular momentum (OAM) free-space optical (FSO) communication system. In this article, we propose an OAM mode recognition method based on image recognition technology, which uses the interferogram between the vortex beam and the Gaussian beam to identify the OAM mode. In order to resist the influence of atmospheric turbulence on the recognition accuracy, we added a Gaussian smoothing filter into the recognition process. Moreover, we used random phase screens to generate interferogram sets at distances of 1 km and 2 km. The verification result shows that the proposed scheme produces high identification accuracy for the distorted optical field. The average accuracy can reach 100% and 87.78% under the conditions of medium- and strong-turbulence levels, respectively. It is anticipated that these results might be helpful for improving the reliability of the OAM-FSO communication system in the future.

A novel multifunctional device based on a hybrid metal–graphene Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) metamaterial at the terahertz band is proposed. It is composed of a parallel cut wire pair (PCWP) that serves as a dark mode resonator, a vertical cut wire pair (VCWP) that serves as a bright mode resonator and a graphene ribbon that serves as a modulator. An ultra-broadband transmission window with 1.23 THz bandwidth can be obtained. The spectral extinction ratio can be tuned from 26% to 98% by changing the Fermi level of the graphene. Compared with previous work, our work has superior performance in the adjustable bandwidth of the transmission window without changing the structure of the dark and bright mode resonators, and has a high extinction ratio and dynamic adjustability. Besides, we present the specific application of the device in filters and optical modules. Therefore, we believe that such a metamaterial structure provides a new way to actively control EIT-like, which has promising applications in broadband optical filters and photoelectric intensity modulators in terahertz communications.