Ray-tracing simulation of metalens elements for polarization imaging

The interest in the integration of metalens elements into optical systems has grown rapidly due to their small form factor and potential to integrate several complex optical functions into a single surface. Ideally, the optimization of systems replacing some refractive elements with a metalens should be done directly in the ray tracing software for a smooth workflow. However, it is still a challenge to integrate metalens elements into ray tracing-based optical simulations as they are more naturally simulated with wave optics methods. In this article, we propose an improved ray tracing method for metalens based devicesbased devices that accurately accounts for the polarization response of the meta-atoms so that the method can be used for the design and simulation of polarization sensitive metalenses. This improvement opens the metalens design space to more complex meta-atoms and optical functions.