Flatland Metasurfaces for Optical Gas Sensing

Flatland metasurfaces provide a fundamentally distinct approach to optical gas sensing by confining light-matter interaction to planar, subwavelength interfaces, where resonant energy storage and near-field enhancement replace extended optical path lengths. This review presents a physics-driven perspective on metasurface-enabled gas sensing, focusing on how gaseous analytes perturb the complex eigenmodes of engineered planar resonators. Diverse sensing modalities, including enhanced molecular absorption, refractive index-induced resonance shifts, loss modulation, polarization conversion, and chemo-optical transduction, are unified within a common perturbative framework that links sensitivity to mode confinement, quality factor, and analyte overlap. The analysis highlights fundamental trade-offs imposed by material dispersion, intrinsic loss, and radiation balance across plasmonic, dielectric, polaritonic, and hybrid metasurface platforms operating from the visible to the terahertz regime. Attention is given to the limits of chemical selectivity in flatland architectures and to the role of functional materials, multimodal transduction, and computational inference in addressing these constraints. System-level considerations, including thermal stability, fabrication tolerance, and integration with detectors and electronics, are identified as critical determinants of real-world performance. By consolidating disparate approaches within a unified flatland framework, this review provides physical insight and design guidance for the development of compact, integrable, and application-specific optical gas sensing systems.