Miniaturized on-chip optical differentiator based on 2F-structured metasurfaces.

Analog optical computing based on Fourier optics has attracted ever-growing attention, offering unprecedented low power consumption and high parallelism computation at the speed of light. Typically, classical optical 4F systems have been widely employed as one of the most common approaches for analog optical computing. However, most existing schemes replicate the original architecture relying on two Fourier transforms and one spatial-frequency filtering, resulting in bulky size and complex structure. Here, we propose a novel, to the best of our knowledge, on-chip 2F structure that achieves ultra-miniaturized optical analog computing. Taking advantage of the exceptional design flexibility of metasurfaces, we reduce the optical path length through a combination of phase compensation and complex amplitude modulation, thereby significantly simplifying the system structure without sacrificing accuracy compared to the traditional 4F system. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, we design and fabricate an on-chip optical differentiator on a silicon-on-insulator platform, achieving 84.01% and 79.81% differentiation accuracy in simulation and experiment, respectively.