Metasurface optical holography

Abstract

Photonic metasurface, a 2D array of plasmonic or dielectric optical meta-atoms, provides a versatile and compact platform for manipulating the polarization, phase and amplitude of light. It has been used to design planar optical functional elements such as ultrathin metasurface lens, metasurface waveplates, polarization beam splitter and so on. More generally, metasurface is capable of shaping the general and complex wavefront of light through holography techniques. Compared with conventional techniques, optical holography based on metasurface provides much more flexibilities to control the polarization, view angle, dispersive color crosstalk of holographic images, and thus making the metasurface optics more practical for various applications. In this review, we firstly discuss the concept of metasurface holography based on various phase modulation mechanisms including resonant phase, geometric phase, and propagation phase, etc. Then various holographic multiplexing techniques through degrees of wavelength, polarization, spatial distribution and nonlinear optical processes are summarized. Finally, we envision the future applications of metasurface optical holography from the view of large area fabrication, reconfigurable and dynamic wavefront engineering for 3D displaying, high capacity data storage, information encryption and so on.