Optoelectronic Metasurface for Free-Space Optical-Microwave Interactions

Photon-electron interactions are essential for many areas such as energy conversion, signal processing, and emerging quantum science. However, the current demonstrations are typically targeted to fiber and on-chip applications and lack of study in wave space. Here, we introduce a concept of optoelectronic metasurface that is capable of realizing direct and efficient optical-microwave interactions in free space. The optoelectronic metasurface is realized via a hybrid integration of microwave resonant meta-structures with a photoresponsive material. As a proof of concept, we construct an ultrathin optoelectronic metasurface using photodiodes that is bias free, which is modeled and analyzed theoretically by using the light-driven electronic excitation principle and microwave network theory. The incident laser and microwave from the free space will interact with the photodiode-based metasurface simultaneously and generate strong laser-microwave coupling, where the phase of output microwave depends on the input laser intensity. We experimentally verify that the reflected microwave phase of the optoelectronic metasurface decreases as the incident laser power becomes large, providing a distinct strategy to control the vector fields by the power intensity. Our results offer fundamentally new understanding of the metasurface capabilities and the wave-matter interactions in hybrid materials.