Experimental study demonstrates an all-optical metasurface accelerometer with nanogravity noise levels, highlighting potential for compact, high-precision inertial navigation.
High-precision low-frequency acceleration sensing is essential for applications in navigation, seismology, and structural health monitoring, yet achieving both high sensitivity and compactness within a scalable platform remains challenging. Here, we report an all-optical meta-accelerometer that integrates a polarization-encoded metasurface with a mechanical spring structure, enabling acceleration-to-displacement transduction and optical polarization readout in an ultracompact footprint. The experiment demonstrates that the sensor has a displacement noise floor of 340 pm / Hz at 1 hertz. By coupling the metasurface to a 3D-printed elastic suspension, we realize inertial acceleration sensing with a noise level of 900 ng / Hz at 1 hertz and an amplitude dynamic range of 85.6 decibels. This work demonstrates the feasibility of metasurface-based inertial sensing and opens possibilities for developing high-precision, large dynamic range accelerometers with high-integration potential.
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Zang et al. (2026) studied this question.
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