Abstract
Quasicrystal metasurfaces, a kind of two-dimensional artificial optical materials with subwavelength meta-atoms arranged in quasi-periodic tiling schemes, have attracted extensive attentions due to their novel optical properties. In a recent work, a dual-functional quasicrystal metasurface, which can be used to simultaneously generate the diffraction pattern and holographic image, is experimentally demonstrated. The proposed method expands the manipulation dimensions for multi-functional quasicrystal metasurfaces and may have important applications in microscopy, optical information processing, optical encryption, etc.
Holography, is a technique first introduced by Denis Gabor in 1948 to improve the resolution of electron microscope1. Later, optical holography was extensively investigated in many areas, including microscopy2, three-dimensional display3, classical and quantum optical information processing4,5. Compared to conventional optical holographic devices such as spatial light modulators6 and multilevel diffractive optical elements7, metasurface composed of spatially variant meta-atoms represents a novel platform for manipulating the degrees of freedom of light fields8. As the feature size and phase steps of the meta-atoms can be easily engineered, metasurfaces usually have higher optical diffraction efficiency than their counterparts. With the rapid development of the design principles of meta-atoms, the efficiency9, multiplexing channels10 and working bandwidth11,12 of the metasurface optical holograms have been greatly improved in the past years. Furthermore, employing the concept of nonlinear geometric phase13,14, vectorial holographic images at second harmonic frequencies are demonstrated by using the nonlinear plasmonic metasurfaces15.
Inspired by the concept of quasicrystal16,17, various photonic quasicrystals18 are proposed to control the properties of light transmission19, laser action20 and harmonic generations21,22. Usually, the optical properties of photonic quasicrystals are mainly governed by the long-range order without translational periodicity. On the other side, the phase, polarization and amplitude of light can be locally manipulated by using either plasmonic or dielectric meta-atoms8. Therefore, more optical functionalities can be developed by taking the advantages of photonic quasicrystal and metasurfaces.
In a recent work published in eLight23, Xu et al. propose and demonstrate a Penrose type quasicrystal metasurface which can be used to simultaneously reconstruct holographic images and project far-field diffraction patterns, as illustrated in Fig. 1. The proposed quasicrystal metasurface is composed of silicon meta-atoms which are fabricated on a glass substrate by using electron beam lithography and inductively coupled plasma etching. By judiciously designing the distributions of the geometric phase and propagation phase type meta-atoms by using a self-developed holographic algorithm, the authors realize the dual functionality of optical holography and diffraction. In principle, different tiling schemes22,24 and optical properties can be introduced into the design of the quasicrystal metasurfaces. It is anticipated that the proposed strategy may have important applications in the areas of optical information encryption, optical display, optical computing and so on.
The quasicrystal metasurface consists of silicon meta-atoms arranged based on the Penrose tiling scheme. Under the illumination of the normally incident light, a holographic image at the predefined distance and a far field diffraction pattern with ten-fold rotation symmetry can be observed
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by National Key Technologies R&D Program of China (2022YFA1404301), National Natural Science Foundation of China (12161141010).
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Wen, X., Hu, Z., Wang, H. et al. Quasicrystal metasurface for optical holography and diffraction.
Light Sci Appl 13, 246 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-024-01578-z
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Published: 09 September 2024
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-024-01578-z