High-Beam-Quality Meta-Grating Couplers for Large Collimated Free-Space Beams on Silicon-on-Insulator

Photonic integrated circuits on the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform typically interface with free space via grating couplers, but scaling these to collimated beams with diameters beyond 100 $\mu$m requires a fundamentally different regime of extremely weak, spatially distributed coupling.

While such large-area couplers have been demonstrated, their beam quality has remained largely uncharacterized, even though applications such as coupling into high-finesse resonators or trapping of cold atoms require both a large aperture and a near-Gaussian profile.

This article presents an SOI meta-grating coupler that emits collimated, near-Gaussian beams of approximately 300 $\mu$m waist diameter.

The design synthesizes the required emission profile from a spatially tailored coupling strength, realized by locally varying a sub-wavelength unit cell while independently setting the local emission angle.

This approach achieves the very low coupling strengths required for large beams and yields a measured beam quality of $M^2 \leq 1.10$.

The scheme extends directly to other target profiles, such as flat-top or higher-order modes, rendering meta-grating couplers a practical chip-to-free-space interface for mode-matching-sensitive applications.