Orbital angular momentum holography for high-security encryption

Abstract

Holography has been identified as a vital platform for three-dimensional displays, optical encryption, microscopy and artificial intelligence through different physical dimensions. However, unlike the wavelength and polarization divisions, orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light, despite its helical wavefront being an independent physical dimension, has not been implemented as an information carrier for holography due to the lack of helical mode index selectivity in the Bragg diffraction formula. Here, we demonstrate OAM holography by discovering strong OAM selectivity in the spatial-frequency domain without a theoretical helical mode index limit. As such, OAM holography allows the multiplexing of a wide range of OAM-dependent holographic images with a helical mode index spanning from −50 to 50, leading to a 10 bit OAM-encoded hologram for high-security optical encryption. Our results showing up to 210 OAM-dependent distinctive holographic images mark a new path to achieving ultrahigh-capacity holographic information systems harnessing the previously inaccessible OAM division. The orbital angular momentum degree of freedom is used to demonstrate 10 bit holographic images with a helical mode index spanning from −50 to 50.