Metasurface-enabled miniaturized quantitative phase imaging system.

Miniaturization of quantitative phase imaging systems is crucial for advancing point-of-care diagnostics and enabling real-time, in-line inspection of semiconductor wafer defects. In this work, we propose a miniaturized quantitative phase imaging system based on a metasurface. The metasurface, comprising a pixelated deflector array and multilayer thin films, converts the spatial frequencies of incident wavefronts into intensity variations, thereby enabling single-shot quantitative phase imaging. By optimizing the spatial frequency-dependent transmittance of multilayer thin films, we design and simulate a metasurface with a high numerical aperture of up to 0.2. Explicitly, we have numerically validated the phase imaging capability of the proposed system. Our work paves the way for the miniaturization of optical measurement systems.