Chaotic Metasurfaces

Metasurfaces are thin, artificially structured arrays of meta-atoms that allow manipulation of optical fields on a subwavelength scale. In this work, we show the emergence of chaotic-like behavior in a simplified model of a metasurface with spatiotemporal dynamics. The system is modeled on three levels. First, the incident light is described using a random walk model to introduce temporal phase fluctuations. Second, the metasurface is treated as an anisotropic structure that introduces spatially varying amplitude and phase shifts. Finally, the resulting field is propagated using Fresnel diffraction to obtain the output intensity. We demonstrate that this simple model exhibits signatures of chaotic-like dynamics, including the formation of attractors and characteristic relationships between frequency components and the power spectral density. These results highlight how complex behavior can emerge from simple optical systems.