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During the past decades, major advances have been made in both the generation and detection of infrared light; however, its efficient wavefront manipulation and information processing still encounter great challenges. Efficient and fast optoelectronic modulators and spatial light modulators are required for mid-infrared imaging, sensing, security screening, communication and navigation, to name a few. However, their development remains elusive, and prevailing methods reported so far have suffered from drawbacks that significantly limit their practical applications. In this study, by leveraging graphene and metasurfaces, we demonstrate a high-performance free-space mid-infrared modulator operating at gigahertz speeds, low gate voltage and room temperature. We further pixelate the hybrid graphene metasurface to form a prototype spatial light modulator for high frame rate single-pixel imaging, suggesting orders of magnitude improvement over conventional liquid crystal or micromirror-based spatial light modulators. This work opens up the possibility of exploring wavefront engineering for infrared technologies for which fast temporal and spatial modulations are indispensable.
Zeng et al. (Tue,) studied this question.