Optical telescope with Cassegrain metasurfaces

Abstract The Cassegrain telescope, made of a concave primary mirror and a convex secondary mirror, is widely utilized for modern astronomical observation. However, the existence of curved mirrors inevitably results in bulky configurations. Here, we propose a new design of the miniaturized Cassegrain telescope by replacing the curved mirrors with planar reflective metasurfaces. The focusing and imaging properties of the Cassegrain metasurface telescopes are experimentally verified for circularly polarized incident light at near infrared wavelengths. The concept of the metasurface telescopes can be employed for applications in telescopes working at infrared, Terahertz, and microwave and even radio frequencies.