Optical Phase Properties of Small Numbers of Nanoslits and an Application for Higher-efficiency Fresnel Zone Plates

We have studied the behavior of light in the intermediate regime between a single nanoslit and an infinite nanoslit array. We first calculated the optical characteristics of a small number of nanoslits using finite element numerical analysis. The phase variance of the proposed nanoslit model shows a gradual phase shift between a single nanoslit and ideal nanoslit array, which stabilizes before the total array length becomes ~0.5 λ. Next, we designed a transmission-enhanced Fresnel zone plate by applying the phase characteristics from the small-number nanoslit model. The virtual-point-source method suggests that the proposed Fresnel zone plate with phase-invariant nanoslits achieves 2.34x higher transmission efficiency than a conventional Fresnel zone plate. Our report describes the intermediate behaviors of a nanoslit array, which could also benefit subwavelength metallic structure research of metasurfaces.