Since its invention, holography has emerged as a powerful tool to fully reconstruct the wavefronts of light including all the fundamental properties (amplitude, phase, polarization, wave vector, and frequency). For exploring the full capability for information storage/display and enhancing the encryption security of metasurface holograms, smart multiplexing techniques together with suitable metasurface designs are highly demanded. Here, we integrate multiple polarization manipulation channels for various spatial phase profiles into a single birefringent vectorial hologram by completely avoiding unwanted cross-talk. Multiple independent target phase profiles with quantified phase relations that can process significantly different information in different polarization states are realized within a single metasurface. For our metasurface holograms, we demonstrate high fidelity, large efficiency, broadband operation, and a total of twelve polarization channels. Such multichannel polarization multiplexing can be used for dynamic vectorial holographic display and can provide triple protection for optical security. The concept is appealing for applications of arbitrary spin to angular momentum conversion and various phase modulation/beam shaping elements.

Metasurface holography has the advantage of realizing complex wavefront modulation by thin layers together with the progressive technique of computer-generated holographic imaging. Despite the well-known light parameters, like amplitude, phase, polarization and frequency, the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of a beam can be regarded as another degree of freedom. Here, we propose and demonstrate orbital angular momentum multiplexing at different polarization channels using a birefringent metasurface for holographic encryption. The OAM selective holographic information can only be reconstructed with the exact topological charge and a specific polarization state. By using an incident beam with different topological charges as erasers, we mimic a super-resolution case for the reconstructed image, in analogy to the well-known STED technique in microscopy. The combination of multiple polarization channels together with the orbital angular momentum selectivity provides a higher security level for holographic encryption. Such a technique can be applied for beam shaping, optical camouflage, data storage, and dynamic displays.

Secret sharing is a well-established cryptographic primitive for storing highly sensitive information like encryption keys for encoded data. It describes the problem of splitting a secret into different shares, without revealing any information to its shareholders. Here, we demonstrate an all-optical solution for secret sharing based on metasurface holography. In our concept, metasurface holograms are used as spatially separable shares that carry encrypted messages in the form of holographic images. Two of these shares can be recombined by bringing them close together. Light passing through this stack of metasurfaces accumulates the phase shift of both holograms and optically reconstructs the secret with high fidelity. In addition, the hologram generated by each single metasurface can uniquely identify its shareholder. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the inherent translational alignment sensitivity between two stacked metasurface holograms can be used for spatial multiplexing, which can be further extended to realize optical rulers.

Abstract：Metasurfaces possess the outstanding ability to tailor phase, amplitude and even spectral responses of light with an unprecedented ultrahigh resolution, thus have attracted significant interests. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel meta-device that integrates color printing and computergenerated holograms within a single-layer dielectric metasurface by modulating spectral and spatial responses at subwavelength scale, simultaneously. In our design, such metasurface appears as a microscopic color image under white light illumination, while encrypting two different holographic images that can be projected at the far-field when illuminated with red and green laser beams. We choose amorphous silicon dimers and nanofins as building components and use a modified parallel Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm to obtain multiple sub-holograms with arbitrary spatial shapes for image-indexed arrangements. Such a method can further extend the design freedom of metasurfaces. By exploiting spectral and spatial control at the level of individual pixels, multiple sets of independent information can be introduced into a single-layer device, the additional complexity and enlarged information capacity are promising for novel applications such as information security and anti-counterfeiting.Metasurfaces consisting of subwavelength metallic/dielectric antennas can provide a revolutionized way to achieve full control of light with ultrahigh resolution. [1][2][3][4][5] Possessing the advantages of flexibility, simplicity, subwavelength resolution, low absorption loss along with low fabrication cost, [6] they have shown great promise for achieving a wide variety of practical applications, such as beam shaping, [7][8][9] phase control, [10,11] achromatic lenses in the visible wavelengths, [12,13] invisibility cloaking, [14] data storage, [15,16] optical security and anti-counterfeiting. [17][18][19] In particular, by spatially encoding interfacial phase jumps at the subwavelength scale, they allow us to reconstruct 2D or 3D holographic images while realizing wide-angle projection and elimination of high-order diffraction. [20][21][22][23][24] Meta-holograms can be designed to reconstruct different images with polarization, angular and wavelength multiplexing by using anisotropic meta-atoms [25,26] or spatial multiplexing techniques. [27][28][29][30] Apart from the above mentioned spatial modulation, the spectral response offers another degree of freedom for designing metasurfaces. Typically, the geometric shape (especially the anisotropic geometry under different polarization illumination), material property and spatial arrangement affect the spectral response of a metasurface, which is being reflected in its resonance behavior, implying an alteration of the transmission, reflection, absorption, emission and so on. For instance, the coexistence of strong electric and magnetic resonances within meta-atoms can be utilized for the design of Huygens' metasurfaces with almost uniform transmittance. [31][32][33] In addition, ...

As flexible optical devices that can manipulate the phase and amplitude of light, metasurfaces would clearly benefit from directional optical properties. However, single layer metasurface systems consisting of two-dimensional nanoparticle arrays exhibit only a weak spatial asymmetry perpendicular to the surface and therefore have mostly symmetric transmission features. Here, we present a metasurface design principle for nonreciprocal polarization encryption of holographic images. Our approach is based on a two-layer plasmonic metasurface design that introduces a local asymmetry and generates a bidirectional functionality with full phase and amplitude control of the transmitted light. The encoded hologram is designed to appear in a particular linear cross-polarization channel, while it is disappearing in the reverse propagation direction. Hence, layered metasurface systems can feature asymmetric transmission with full phase and amplitude control and therefore expand the design freedom in nanoscale optical devices toward asymmetric information processing and security features for anticounterfeiting applications.