Optical and Thermal Design and Analysis of Phase-Change Metalenses for Active Numerical Aperture Control

The control of a lens’s numerical aperture has potential applications in areas such as photography and imaging, displays, sensing, laser processing and even laser-implosion fusion. In such fields, the ability to control lens properties dynamically is of much interest, and active meta-lenses of various kinds are under investigation due to their modulation speed and compactness. However, as of yet, meta-lenses that explicitly offer dynamic control of a lens’s numerical aperture have received little attention. Here, we design and simulate active meta-lenses (specifically, focusing meta-mirrors) using chalcogenide phase-change materials to provide such control. We show that, operating at a wavelength of 3000 nm, our devices can change the numerical aperture by up to a factor of 1.85 and operate at optical intensities of the order of 1.2 × 10⁹ Wm⁻². Furthermore, we show the scalability of our design towards shorter wavelengths (visible spectrum), where we demonstrate a change in NA by a factor of 1.92.