Active optical metasurfaces, capable of dynamically manipulating light in ultrathin form factors, enable novel interfaces between humans and technology. In such interfaces, soft materials bring many advantages based on their flexibility, compliance and large stimulus-driven responses. Here, we create electrochemically mutable, soft metasurfaces that capitalize on the swelling of soft conducting polymers to alter the shape and associated resonant response of metasurface elements. Such geometric tuning overcomes the typical trade-off between achieving substantial tuning and low optical loss that is intrinsic to dynamic metasurfaces relying on index tuning of materials. Using the commercial polymer PEDOT:PSS, we demonstrate dynamic, high-resolution colour tuning and high-diffraction-efficiency (>19%) beam-steering devices that operate at CMOS-compatible voltages (~1.5 V). These results highlight how the deformability of soft materials can enable a class of high-performance metasurfaces that are suitable for body-worn technologies.

有源光学超表面能够动态操纵超薄外形的光线，实现了人类与技术之间的新界面。在这样的界面中，软材料基于其柔韧性、柔顺性和较大的刺激驱动反应带来了许多优势。在这里，我们创建了电化学可变的软超表面，它利用软导电聚合物的膨胀来改变超表面元件的形状和相关共振响应。这种几何调整克服了实现大量调谐和低光学损耗之间的典型权衡，这是依赖于材料折射率调整的动态超表面所固有的。使用商业聚合物 PEDOT：PSS，我们展示了在 CMOS 兼容电压 （~1.5 V） 下工作的动态、高分辨率颜色调谐和高衍射效率 （>19%） 波束控制设备。这些结果突出了软材料的变形能力如何实现一类适用于可穿戴技术的高性能超表面。