Single-celled multifunctional metasurfaces merging structural-color nanoprinting and holography

Nanostructured metasurfaces applied in structural-color nanoprinting and holography have been extensively investigated in the past several years. Recently, merging them together is becoming an emerging approach to improve the information capacity and functionality of metasurfaces. However, current approaches, e.g., segmenting, interleaving and stacking schemes for function merging, suffer from crosstalk, low information density, design and fabrication difficulties. Herein, we employ a single-celled approach to design and experimentally demonstrate a high-density multifunctional metasurface merging nanoprinting and holography, i.e., each nanostructure in the metasurface can simultaneously manipulate the spectra (enabled with varied dimensions of nanostructures) and geometric phase (enabled with varied orientation angles of nanostructures) of incident light. Hence, with different decoding strategies, a structural-color nanoprinting image emerges right at the metasurface plane under white light illumination, while a holographic image is reconstructed in the Fraunhofer diffraction zone under circularly polarized laser light incidence. And the two images have no crosstalk since they are independently designed and presented at different distances. Our proposal suggests a space-multiplexing scheme to develop advanced metasurfaces and one can find their markets in high-density information storage, optical information encryption, multi-channel image display, etc. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

Nanostructured metasurfaces have been extensively studied for structural-color nanoprinting and holography applications. A new approach of merging these functionalities together has been proposed to enhance the information capacity and functionality of metasurface devices. By employing a single-celled approach, high-density multifunctional metasurfaces have been designed to manipulate light spectra and geometric phase simultaneously for both nanoprinting and holography. Such metasurfaces have potential applications in high-density information storage, optical information encryption, multi-channel image displays, and more.