The micro-optics group at SINTEF MiNaLab has experience in developing optical surfaces based on diffractive optical elements (DOE) in our state of the art clean room facilities. Micro-structured surfaces allow for small, lightweight components of high quality and low cost, and have applications such as grating lenses for accurate distance measurement or spectroscopy. We are currently investigating a new related technology platform known as metasurfaces. Consisting of simple nano-structures smaller than the wavelength, metasurfaces offer control of all degrees of freedom of the propagating field: Pointwise phase control, polarization conversion, amplitude modulation and phase dispersion. Metasurfaces can for instance therefore realize high quality flat lenses by modulating the wavefront over a surface, after Huygen's principle. Metasurfaces can also potentially integrate large and expensive optical components such as polarizers, wave retarders, and lenses into a single surface, thereby offering to reduce the size and weight of e.g. optical sensors. High quality holographic imaging is also possible by engineering both phase and amplitude simultaneously.
In this master project the candidate will design metasurfaces for the application of gas sensing using finite element time domain (FDTD) and plane wave expansion (PWE) simulations. In the microoptics group at SINTEF we are currently planning to produce metasurfaces based on our own designs – and the candidate will be given the opportunity to work with characterizing these using optical methods. The candidate will be supervised by Johannes Skaar (professor at ITS) and co-supervised by Christopher Dirdal (researcher at SINTEF MiNaLab).