A Single-Celled Tri-Functional Metasurface Enabled with Triple Manipulations of Light

Abstract

© 2020 Wiley-VCH GmbH Metasurfaces capable of controlling more than two types of optical properties have drawn a broad interest recently, as they can bring great flexibility and possibilities to the design of highly-integrated multifunctional devices such as simultaneous nanoprint and holograms. However, current multifunctional metasurfaces can perform only two types of optical manipulations separately. Furthermore, their supercell or multilayer design strategies would complicate both the nanostructure design and manufacturing, and are difficult to implement the miniaturization, low-cost, and multifunctionality of light integration. Herein, merely with a single-cell design approach, a tri-functional metasurface enabled with triple manipulations of light is proposed. By merging the spectrum, polarization and phase manipulations into a single metasurface, a “three-in-one” meta-device simultaneously acting as a structural-color nanoprint, a polarization-controlled grayscale meta-image displayer and a phase-modulated meta-hologram can be constructed. Specifically, the structural-color image appears right at the metasurface plane under a natural light source while the grayscale meta-image and holographic image are reconstructed by taking different optical setups as decoding keys, which can not only significantly increase the light integration but also improve the reliability of both images. The proposed metasurface represents a new paradigm in designing multifunctional meta-devices, and has promising prospects in image displays, optical storage, optical anti-counterfeiting, etc.