Role of Titanium dioxide(TiO₂)

in Optics

Name- Ayyaz Imam

Roll No.- 1703009
Branch- Metallurgical Engineering
To get rid of chromatic aberrations
optical devices are made using
combination of separate lenses.
Each lens is accurately shaped and
designed to focus the incident light
at the exact same spot.
This ends up adding weight,
thickness, complexity and also
increases the cost of the device.
What is a metalens?
•These are flat surfaces that use nanostructures to focus light.
•They already have applications in the infrared regions due to
high efficiency in that spectrum.
•We study the variation of efficiency of these metasurfaces in
the visible spectrum.
•Highly efficient metasurfaces can be developed which could
replace the complex compound lenses by a single plane
surface.

Huygen’s Principle:
What a metasurface basically does?
Fabrication of the Titanium Dioxide Metasurface

Fig. (a) A glass substrate is first spin coated with electron beam lithography(EBL) resist
(b) The resist is exposed to EBL and is subsequently developed.
(c) The intial stage of Atomic Layer Deposition(ALD) of TiO₂ onto the patterned resist.
(d) At the end of ALD process, a blanket of TiO₂ is formed on top of the resist.
(e) We etch down the TiO₂ until the resist layer is reached.
(f) The resist is removed and stripped such that only the nanostructures remain and
the height of the nanostructures are defined by the height of spin coated resist.
 Why Titanium Dioxide(TiO₂)?

There are other candidates such as Silicon Nitride(SiN) and

Gallium Nitride(GaN), but their refractive index is high only for
infrared regions. On the other hand TiO₂ has a high
transparency window in wavelengths longer than 360nm along
with high refractive index. A high refractive index ensures
strong confinement of the light which allows to control the
exiting wavefront without scattering.
Advantages:
Thickness, weight, not bulky
Especially useful outside the
visible spectrum
Problems to overcome:
Efficiency
Chromatic Abberations
Absorption Loss
Dynamic Tunability
Variation of efficiency with refractive index at different numerical apertures
•The normal Len’s makers formula of 1/f=(n-1)(1/R-1/R’) does not
imply on metalens.
•The metalenses do not have a radius of curvature and are flat.
•For metalens there is no study or theoretical formula relating
refractive index to focal length and performance or efficiency.
•After analysing wide range of refractive indices to estimate the
relationship between Refactive Indices and performance of metalens,
the result was obtained as shown by the graph below
A. B.

Fig A. X-Ray diffraction of Atomic Layer Deposited TiO₂. There are no observable diffraction
peaks from any TiO₂ polymorphs. The peaks that appear in the scan result from the X- ray
diffraction stage. The X- ray diffraction with the sample is represented by red while
without the sample is represented by blue.
Fig. B. Atomic force microscope image of bare glass substrate with a root mean square
roughness of 0.698 nm.
Fig. A. Measured real and imaginary part of the refractive index as a function of
wavelength. Blue squares represent real part and red circles represent the imaginary part
of refractive index. For the amorphous titanium dioxide to have negligible absorption loss,
the imaginary part of the complex refractive index must be negligible.
Fig. B. Atomic force microscope image of a typical TiO₂ film deposited via Atomic layer
deposition process. The film is an atomically smooth surface with RMS roughness of 0.738
nm.
• Dielectric Metasurfaces were limited to transparency
windows at infrared wavelengths due to significant optical
absorption loss at visible wavelengths.

• With the new fabrication technoques and materials, we

record substantial improvements in efficiency, ranging
from 78 to 82%.
References:
 Robert C Delwin, Mohammadreza Khorasaninnejad, “Broadband high
efficiency dielectric metasurfaces for visible spectrum.”
 Elyas Bayati, Alan Zhan, Arka Mazumdaar, “Role of refractive index in metalens
performance”
 Mikhail A Catz, ”Ultrathin Plasmonic Metasurfaces for Moulding the flow of
light”.
 Schuming Wang, Vincent Su, Ding Ping Tsai, Tzu Ting Huang, “A Broadband
Achromatic Metalens in the visible.
 D. Mergel, M. Huppertz, “Nucleation and growth in TiO2 films prepared by
Sputtering and Evaporation.”
 Ishan Mishra, Mohammadreza Khorasaninnejad, Robert C. Delwin, “Visible
wavelength planar metalenses based on TiO2.”
 Mohammadreza Khorasaninnejad, W. T. Chen, “Achromatic Metalens in the
visible and Metalens with reverse chromatic dispersion.”