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In this work, we utilize thin dielectric meta-atoms placed on a silver substrate to efficiently enhance and manipulate the third harmonic generation. We theoretically and experimentally reveal that when the structural symmetry of the meta-atom is incompatible with the lattice symmetry of an array, some generalized nonlinear geometric phases appear, which offers new possibilities for harmonic generation control beyond the accessible symmetries governed by the selection rule. The underlying mechanism is attributed to the modified rotation of the effective principal axis of a dense meta-atom array, where the strong coupling among the units gives rise to a generalized linear geometric phase modulation on the pump light. Therefore, nonlinear geometric phases carried by the third-harmonic emissions are the natural result of the wave-mixing process among the modes excited at the fundamental frequency. This mechanism further points out a new strategy to predict the nonlinear geometric phases delivered by the nanostructures according to their linear responses. Our design is simple and efficient, and offers alternatives for the nonlinear meta-devices that are capable of flexible photon generation and manipulation.

Optical geometric-phase metasurface provides a robust and efficient means for light control by simply manipulating the spatial orientations of the in-plane anisotropic meta-atoms, where polarization conversion plays a vital role. However, the concept of acoustic geometric-phase modulation for acoustic field control remains unexplored because airborne acoustic waves lack a similar optical polarization conversion process. In this work, a new type of acoustic meta-atom with deep subwavelength feature size is theoretically investigated and further applied to acoustic field engineering based on the so-called acoustic geometric phase. Herein, tunable acoustic geometric-phase modulation of designated order is obtained via the near-field coupled orbital angular momentum transfer process, and the topological charge-multiplexed acoustic geometric phase endows our meta-arrays with multiple functionalities. Our work extends the capacity of acoustic meta-arrays in high-quality acoustic field reconstruction and offers new possibilities in multifunctional acoustic meta-holograms.

Metasurfaces based on geometric phase acquired from the conversion of the optical spin states provide a robust control over the wavefront of light, and have been widely employed for construction of various types of functional metasurface devices. However, this powerful approach cannot be readily transferred to the manipulation of acoustic waves because acoustic waves do not possess the spin degree of freedom. Here, we propose the concept of acoustic geometric-phase meta-array by leveraging the conversion of orbital angular momentum of acoustic waves, where well-defined geometric-phases can be attained through versatile topological charge conversion processes. This work extends the concept of geometric-phase metasurface from optics to acoustics, and provides a new route for acoustic wave control., Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures

We demonstrated a 2D helical chiral metamaterial that exhibits broadband strong optical activity resulting nonresonant Drude-like response. The strong chirality leads to broadband negative refractive index with high figure of merit (>90) and extremely low loss (<2% per layer). The optical activity are insensitive to the angles of incident electromagnetic waves, thereby enabling more flexibility in polarization manipulation applicaitons.

Because of the strong inherent resonances, the giant optical activity obtained via chiral metamaterials generally suffers from high dispersion, which has been a big stumbling block to broadband applications. In this paper, we propose a type of chiral metamaterial consisting of interconnected metal helix structures with four-fold symmetry, which exhibits nonresonant Drude-like response and can therefore avoid the highly dispersive optical activity resulting from resonances. It shows that the well-designed chiral metamaterial can achieve nondispersive and pure optical activity with high transmittance in a broadband frequency range. And the optical activity of multi-layer chiral metamaterials is proportional to the layer numbers of single-layer chiral metamaterial. Most remarkably, the broadband behaviors of nondispersive optical activity and high transmission are insensitive to the incident angles of electromagnetic waves and permittivity of dielectric substrate, thereby enabling more flexibility in polarization manipulation.