Lithium Niobate-Based Metasurface for Telecom Applications
Publication date: 4 Mag 2025
Photonic metasurfaces have revolutionized the manipulation of light for applications ranging from beam steering to advanced communication systems. Central to these planar metamaterials is the ability to engineer subwavelength building blocks - meta-atoms - that enable unprecedented control over electromagnetic waves. Lithium niobate (LN) offers strong electro-optic properties, wide transparency, and chemical stability, making it a promising platform for highperformance metasurface devices. However, realizing high-Q resonances in LN-based metasurfaces remains a significant challenge due to the material's processing complexity. Here we show a LNbased design employing periodic silicon dioxide nanogratings that achieves high reflectivity (up to 99.99 %) at near-telecom wavelengths ($\sim 1450 ~\text{nm}$) with Q-factors reaching 623. By systematically tuning the grating period and the thickness of the LN and silica layers, we demonstrate precise control over the resonance wavelength - shifting it by nearly 15 nm for every 10 nm increase in grating period - and highlight that the intermediate silica layer thickness exerts negligible influence on the resonance, simplifying fabrication. These findings reveal that LN metasurfaces can indeed support strong light confinement and large Q-factors, bridging the gap between theoretical predictions and practical device implementations. As such, our approach provides a robust route toward highly efficient, low-loss photonic components for telecom and other integrated photonic applications.