Recently, Dr. Guixin Li from Department of Materials Science and Engineering, SUSTech and his collaborators from the UK and Germany published a review paper in Nature Reviews Materials. Li, G., Zhang, S. & Zentgraf, T. Nonlinear photonic metasurfaces. Nat. Rev. Mater. 2, 17010 (2017). This work was Supported by the 1000 Young Talent Program of China.

Compared with conventional optical elements, 2D photonic metasurfaces, consisting of arrays of antennas with subwavelength thickness (the ‘meta-atoms’), enable the manipulation of light–matter interactions on more compact platforms. The use of metasurfaces with spatially varying arrangements of meta-atoms that have subwavelength lateral resolution allows control of the polarization, phase and amplitude of light. Many exotic phenomena have been successfully demonstrated in linear optics; however, to meet the growing demand for the integration of more functionalities into a single optoelectronic circuit, the tailorable nonlinear optical properties of metasurfaces will also need to be exploited. In this Review, they discuss the fabrication of nonlinear photonic metasurfaces — in particular, the criteria for choosing the materials and symmetries of the meta-atoms — and explore the design of metasurfaces for the realization of nonlinear optical chirality, of the geometric Berry phase and of wavefront engineering. Finally, the authors survey the application of nonlinear photonic metasurfaces in optical switching and modulation, and we conclude with an outlook on their use for terahertz nonlinear optics and quantum information processing. 

International Collaborations: Dr. Guixin Li, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, China; Prof. Shuang Zhang, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, UK; Prof. Thomas Zentgraf, University of Paderborn, Germany. Recently, this team has published their research works on Photonic Metasurface in several high impact journals such as Nature Physics, Nature Materials, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters and so on.