Mie-resonant silicon metasurfaces for advanced light shaping

The manipulation of light in its spatial and temporal domains with high accuracy is an essential aspect of contemporary photonics. In recent years, metasurfaces—ultrathin arrays of nanostructured elements—have provided the capability to control light’s amplitude, phase, polarization, and spectral properties with unprecedented precision. Notably, Mie-resonant dielectric metasurfaces provide a remarkably low-loss and highly efficient platform for advanced light shaping. This thesis showcases tailored Mie-resonant metasurfaces that enable light shaping in three complementary domains. First, pulse shaping is achieved with spatially variant silicon metasurfaces that encode spectrally selective phase-and-amplitude masks onto femtosecond pulses, yielding user-defined temporal profiles. Second, wavefront shaping is demonstrated through tailored positional disorder in silicon metasurfaces that suppresses unwanted speckle noise and enhances holographic image fidelity. Third, polarization shaping is performed using three-dimensional chiral silicon metasurfaces—vertically stacked dielectric nanostructures that sustain circularpolarization eigenstates over a wide angular range. These findings highlight the potential of Mie-resonant metasurfaces as key enablers of next-generation photonic technologies, offering compact, tunable, and multifunctional solutions for ultrafast optics, quantum technologies, and adaptive optical systems.