Dual-Functional Silicon Metaoptics for Highly-Structured Light Beams

In the last decades, structured light beams under-pinned advanced applications in many fields of life science and information and communication technology. Concurrently, the complex manipulation of light has routed the development of innovative optical tools to control many degrees of freedom in a compact, efficient, and scalable way. To this aim, metalenses revealed a powerful technology that enabled the advanced manipulation of light with unprecedented levels of integrability and density of functionalities. In this work, we will uncover the design and fabrication process of dual-functional metaoptics for the generation and manipulation of highly structured vectorial beams, applying the recipe to silicon metasurfaces generating helico-conical vector beams. These new devices can find intriguing applications in particle tweezing and trapping, high-resolution microscopy, and high bit-rate communications both at the classical and quantum regimes.