Nano-electromechanical spatial light modulator enabled by asymmetric resonant dielectric metasurfaces

Spatial light modulators (SLMs) play essential roles in various free-space optical technologies, offering spatio-temporal control of amplitude, phase, or polarization of light. Beyond conventional SLMs based on liquid crystals or microelectromechanical systems, active metasurfaces are considered as promising SLM platforms because they could simultaneously provide high-speed and small pixel size. However, the active metasurfaces reported so far have achieved either limited phase modulation or low efficiency. Here, we propose nano-electromechanically tunable asymmetric dielectric metasurfaces as a platform for reflective SLMs. Exploiting the strong asymmetric radiation of perturbed high-order Mie resonances, the metasurfaces experimentally achieve a phase-shift close to 290∘, over 50% reflectivity, and a wavelength-scale pixel size. Electrical control of diffraction patterns is also achieved by displacing the Mie resonators using nano-electro-mechanical forces. This work paves the ways for future exploration of the asymmetric metasurfaces and for their application to the next-generation SLMs.