TAG WITH A NON-METALLIC METASURFACE THAT CONVERTS INCIDENT LIGHT INTO ELLIPTICALLY OR CIRCULARLY POLARIZED LIGHT REGARDLESS OF POLARIZATION STATE OF THE INCIDENT LIGHT

摘要

An optical device for generating narrow-band circularly and elliptically polarized radiation, either by conversion from externally incident light or through thermal emission of heated objects. The optical device includes a metasurface comprised of unit cells, where each unit cell contains structural elements or features that break two mirror inversion symmetries of the unit cell and couple bright and dark resonances. In this manner, the optical device emits circularly polarized radiation that does not exhibit a preference for right-hand circularly polarized light or left-hand circularly polarized light incident upon it. As a result, multiple of such optical devices with different unit cell sizes, geometries and dimensions of the intra-cell elements may be implemented as a tag that thermally emits different states of circularly polarized radiation confined to multiple spectrally-narrow bands. Since the optical device can be fabricated in CMOS, the tag can be used for preventing/identifying tampering with genuine electronic components.