Femtosecond Pulse Shaping with Semiconductor Huygens' Metasurfaces

Abstract Shaping of short laser pulses offers versatile applications in laser material processing, quantum state encoding, ultrafast bio‐chemical reactions, and optical communication. Optical metasurfaces have emerged as highly influential and versatile tools for exerting precise control over the properties of incident light. Dielectric Huygens' metasurfaces, in particular, possess the capability to finely tune the transmission phase at a selected operation wavelength while confining and enhancing electric and magnetic modes within the resonators. In this study, pulse shaping is demonstrated at femtosecond time scale using spatially variant silicon Huygens' metasurfaces. Control over pulse dynamics is experimentally achieved, demonstrating the transformation of a single Gaussian pulse into two pulses as well as into a temporally stretched pulse. The excellent agreement between the measured output pulses and these simulations demonstrates the capability of these metasurfaces to generate precise pulse shapes with femtosecond‐level temporal resolution.