Liquid crystal-powered Mie resonators for electrically tunable photorealistic color gradients and dark blacks

Abstract

Taking inspiration from beautiful colors in nature, structural colors produced from nanostructured metasurfaces have shown great promise as a platform for bright, highly saturated, and high-resolution colors. Both plasmonic and dielectric materials have been employed to produce static colors that fulfil the required criteria for high-performance color printing, however, for practical applications in dynamic situations, a form of tunability is desirable. Combinations of the additive color palette of red, green, and blue enable the expression of further colors beyond the three primary colors, while the simultaneous intensity modulation allows access to the full color gamut. Here, we demonstrate an electrically tunable metasurface that can represent saturated red, green, and blue pixels that can be dynamically and continuously controlled between on and off states using liquid crystals. We use this to experimentally realize ultrahigh-resolution color printing, active multicolor cryptographic applications, and tunable pixels toward high-performance full-color reflective displays.

Metasurface-driven full-space structured light for three-dimensional imaging

“…They have been used to demonstrate extraordinary light modulation at the nanoscale, which cannot be observed using conventional optical devices 16 – 18 . With intense studies of light-matter interactions in subwavelength-scale structures 19 – 22 , metasurfaces have demonstrated exceptional functionalities in a variety of applications such as imaging 23 – 25 , color filters 26 – 28 , holographic displays 29 , 30 , polarizing elements 31 , 32 , and beam shapers 33 , 34 . In terms of metasurface for 3D imaging systems, the subwavelength pitch pixels of metasurface can improve the FOV and diffraction efficiency compared to conventional DOEs and SLMs by modulating the phase at a subwavelength resolution.…”

Broad-Band Polarization-Insensitive Metasurface Holography with a Single-Phase Map

“…The planar version of metamaterials − offers unprecedented control over the fundamental characteristics (i.e., amplitude, phase, and polarization) of the electromagnetic (EM) wave through meticulously arranged meta-atoms (having subwavelength scaled dimensions). Their extraordinary unconventional optical properties have attained a bounteous expanse of attention in realizing numerous state-of-the-art optical applications such as metalensing, − nanoprinting, − optical vortex beam generation, , metapolarizers, , etc. Apart from this, metasurfaces as coding material for holography have attracted a prodigious amount of attention due to their high resolution, ultracompact size, large viewing angle, and high diffraction efficiency.…”

Single-Step Fabricable Flexible Metadisplays for Sensitive Chemical/Biomedical Packaging Security and Beyond

“…Metasurfaces composed of subwavelength-scaled nanoresonators − could be an excellent platform for such applications. Metasurfaces have already shown their applicability to demonstrate highly compact and efficient metadevices such as metapolarizers, , metalenses, − meta-absorbers, − optical vortexes, − color filters, − and metaholograms. − For the case of generality, we have assumed the curved shape of containers for chemical and biomedical substances, i.e., test tubes and bottles. Therefore, the aforementioned application requires a flexible polarization-insensitive metasurface under unpolarized white light to achieve its intended operation.…”