A Planar Artificial Compound Eye Based on Metalens Array

In order to realize an optical imaging system with light-weight, integration and large field of view, a planar artificial compound eye structure based on the utilization of a metalens array is proposed. It uses TiO2 nanopillars with different orientation angles to manipulate the electro-magnetic wave based on the grometric phase principles. It makes the surface of the metalens array and the image plane both planar, and does not need the non-spherical processing required by the traditional curved compound eyes. With the superposition of the off-axis phase onto the traditional matalens' focusing phase, the effect produced by the illumination of the non-paraxial light beams on the imaging quality is effectively canceled and a large field of view is achieved. The designed compound eye is mainly composed of an array of 11 X 11 metalenses. It has the size of the 165 mu m X 165 mu m and overall height of 18.6 mu m, with the field of view of 140 degrees X 1.40 degrees. The simulation results indicates that the the proposed compound eye structure achieves good image quality even under the illumination at a large off-axis angle (50 degrees).