Electrically modulated varifocal metalens combined with twisted nematic liquid crystals.

Focus-tunable lenses are indispensable to optical systems. This paper proposes an electrically modulated varifocal metalens combined with twisted nematic liquid crystals. In our design, a metalens is employed to focus on different points depending on the polarization state of incident light. We demonstrated that the varifocal metalens has a sub-millisecond response time. Furthermore, the numerical aperture of both the first and second focal points can be customized to achieve a wide range of 0.2-0.7. Moreover, the full width at half maximum approached the diffraction limit at multiple focal points. Because of the advantages of our proposed electrically modulated metalens, it has the potential for application in optical technology and biomedical science, both of which require high image quality and a rapid response time.