Three-Channel Metasurfaces for Simultaneous Meta-Holography and Meta-Nanoprinting: A Single-Cell Design Approach

By virtue of the extraordinary capability of manipulating the polarization state, amplitude and phase of electromagnetic fields, metasurfaces can be employed to display holographic or nanoprinting images with unprecedented spatial resolution. Bringing holography and nanoprinting together is an effective way toward information multiplexing. However, current approaches mostly utilize interleaving or stacking nanostructures with different functionalities to construct multiplexed metasurfaces, hence they are equivalent to a combination of several metasurfaces and the information capacity of each metasurface remains unchanged. Here, by combining intensity modulation governed by Malus's law with phase manipulation based on both geometric and propagation phases, a single-cell-designed metasurface for three-channel image displays is proposed. The new design strategy can significantly improve the information capacity since the extra phase modulation originates from the orientation degeneracy and dimension variation of nanostructures rather than multilayer or interleaving design. Specifically, a three-channel metasurface is experimentally demonstrated, which can simultaneously record a continuous grayscale nanoprinting image in the near field and project two independent holographic images in the far field. With the advantages of crosstalk-free and ultracompactness, the proposed three-channel metasurfaces can empower the design of multifunctional nano-optical elements for applications in image displays, optical anticounterfeiting, optical storage and many other related fields.