Polarization multiplexing for double images display
1 Introduction
Human eyes and cameras are sensitive to optical patterns with spatially varying intensity or color profiles. However, the phase and polarization states of light are usually ignored due to the inability of general optical elements to distinguish these variations. In fact, the missed phase retardation and polarization states of light usually contain abundant information1-3. Phase information is usually recorded and reconstructed by holography technology based on interference4-6. For polarization, natural light sources and materials are mostly polarized in disorganized and isotropic manners. Even under experimental circumstances, the polarization of light is commonly restricted to a single state, such as linear polarization or circular polarization. To make use of polarization information, it is necessary to generate arbitrary polarization states. Fortunately, the development of metasurfaces makes it possible to produce complex polarization states. It is very convenient to use this concept to generate vector wavefronts such as radially polarized or angularly polarized beams7, 8. Here, we demonstrate an approach to manipulate optical patterns with spatially- and intensity-varying polarization states by virtue of metasurface.
Traditional optical elements and bulk materials encounter many limitations in the precise control of wavefronts on a submicro scale. The development of metasurfaces is expected to solve this problem and to allow arbitrary modulation of wavefronts. Metasurfaces are two-dimensional structures consisting of subwavelength antennas. The manipulation mechanism of metasurfaces is based on the horizontal dimension of the antennas rather than longitudinal thickness9, 10, which makes them ultrathin and easily fabricated. As the nano-technology develops, it is possible to fabricate structures much smaller than wavelength, which means that the manipulation of wavefronts could be regarded as continuous even though the structural elements are discrete. This condition allows for eliminating high-order images, enlarging field of view and improving image contrast. Due to these benefits, metasurfaces are widely employed in optoelectronic devices11-13, near-field microscopy14, 15, optical sensing16, 17, holographic18-20 and nonlinear optics21, 22, covering microwave, terahertz, mid-infrared and visible light ranges23-28. During the flourishing progress of metasurfaces, multi-parameter29-32 control of light is essential for improving information storage capacity33, 34 and image fidelity35, 36. Almost all works mentioned above adopt composite structures to construct the metasurface, such as taking multiple particles29, 32, double layers30 or sub-pixels31 as a control unit. Refs. 30-32 did not involve the spatial distribution of polarization states, but focus on the response to orthogonal incidence polarization states. Grating structures were adapted by Xie et al.37 to achieve multiparameter control. The advantage of this method is the realization of all-parameter control of light. In fact, the pixel pitch is larger than wavelength, so there are multiple levels of diffraction and the images are displayed in different places. Moreover, two sets of structures are used to control the two images. This method mentioned here is able to inhibit the production of high order images. The approach mentioned in Yue et al.'s38 work focuses on the hiding of grayscale images with polarization manipulation. However, only one image is encoded under mutually orthogonal polarization illuminations. Here, we propose a concept to simultaneously manipulate the polarization and amplitude of light and to encode two separate images into a single metasurface. In this work, the incident polarization is fixed, and generated polarization state is spatially varied. The images are successfully recovered with polarization demultiplexing in the experiment.
2 Methods
The schematic of our approach to encode two images into a metasurface is shown in
Fig. 1. (a ) Schematics illustrating the principle and structural design of a metasurface. A uniform planar wave with right circular polarization is irradiated on the metasurface of spatial structural changes, the emitted light field will therefore carry varying amplitude and polarization in space. Intensity distribution is different in two orthogonal polarization components, so the patterns detected at different polarization angles will be different as shown in the left graphic. For viewing purpose, two images are staggered in diagram, but in reality, they are in the same position. (b ) Front view of part of the metasurface, the nano bars are made of gold with varied sizes and rotations, the substrate is SiO2 with refractive index n =1.45.
Supposing that there are two separate intensity only images
Equation (1) gives the modulation function. The reconstruction process can be realized by multiplying unit vectors independently with equation (1),
The polarizer can be regarded as unit vectors
Since the designed metasurface should fit with equation (1), the intensity profile
Because the output linear polarization for each pixel is along the angular bisector of the long and short axes of the metal bar, there is an addition of π/4 in equation (5). For simplicity, two binary images are considered to verify this idea, which means the values of
Fig. 2. All possibilities for binary image (0, 1) synthesis. There are four cases for intensity distributions in the x-polarization and y-polarization, namely, (0, 0), (0, 1), (1, 0) and (1, 1).(a , d ) show the simulated transmittance for four cases under circularly polarized incidence. Rectangles inserted in the figures represent the corresponding nano bars, which have different sizes or rotations and are optimized for 800 nm to meet the requirements. The thickness of nano bars is 30 nm, and the period is 300 nm.
Table 1. Parameters and simulated modulation effect of three kinds of bars.
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3 Results and discussion
To demonstrate this idea, two binary images, one of a plum blossom (as shown in
Fig. 3. Vector composition diagram of binary images.(a , b ) Binary images with pixel numbers 1024×1024 adopted in the design. (c ) Selected vector synthesis diagram corresponding to the yellow region in (a) and (b). The dots, horizontal, vertical and slant arrows represent (0, 0), (1, 0), (0, 1) and (1, 1), respectively.
Fig. 4. Experimental setup for polarized detection.Expander: concave lens with f =-75 mm. Collimation: convex lens with f =200 mm. LP1 and LP2: linear polarizer. QWP: quarter wave plate. Sample: designed metasurface with effective size approximately 300 μm × 300 μm. Lens: convex lens with f =50.8 mm. CCD: charge-coupled device with pixel numbers 1024×1392.
Simulated and experimental results are shown in
Fig. 5. Experimental results of polarization detection.(a ) The simulated and experimental results of images without polarizer, the intensity profile is the superposition of two images. (b ) The simulated and experimental results of images with polarizer along the horizontal and vertical directions, respectively. (c ) Experimental results at 0°, 30°, 45°, 60° and 90° by gradually rotating the analyzer, the pattern gradually transformed from plum blossom to lotus. (d ) SEM image of the fabricated metasurface. The scale bar is 500 nm.
where
This experiment is for principle verification, and there is much to be improved. The nano bars can be replaced with a high refractive index dielectric to obtain higher efficiency39-41 and the image contrast can thus be greatly improved, since the loss of dielectric is much less than metal. The discrete grayscale images can also be encoded in the metasurface by designing more nano bars. For example, if two images with four levels of grayscale (0, 1, 2, 3) were to be encrypted, seven kinds of nano bars should be designed with total transmittance increasing linearly from 0 to 6. The linearly polarized light with different intensities could be generated. Then, the decomposition of light intensity into two polarization directions could be achieved by rotating the bars.
It is worth comparing the phase-polarization control42, 43 with amplitude-polarization control. Admittedly, phase modulation is more efficient than amplitude modulation. However, the design of pure phase modulation is cumbersome or unnecessary for some applications. As a complementary approach, the design of amplitude modulation is straightforward and simple. For example, the radially polarized airy beam only needs amplitude-polarization modulation, which can be easily realized with this method. Furthermore, the antennas are made of metal and the fabrication process is relatively simpler than that of dielectric metasurfaces.
4 Conclusions
In summary, we have demonstrated a method to modulate multiparameters of light using a metasurface. Through simultaneous manipulation of amplitude and polarization, we encoded two binary images into a single metasurface and successfully revealed the images. The proof-of-concept experimental result is in good agreement with theoretical expectations. Despite the relatively low image contrast in the experiments, this method could be improved using an all-dielectric metasurface and extending to grayscale images. This method can be applied in optical image encryption, information storage, polarization holograms, optical communications and fundamental physics.
5 Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the 973 Program of China (grant No. 2013CBA01702); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant Nos. 11474206, 11404224, 1174243, and 11774246); the Beijing Youth Top-Notch Talent Training Plan (CIT & TCD 201504080); the Beijing Nova Program (grant No. Z161100004916100); the Beijing Talents Project (grant No. 2018A19); Capacity Building for Science & Technology Innovation-Fundamental Scientific Research Funds (grand No. 025185305000/142) and the Scientific Research Base Development Program of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education.
6 Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Article Outline
Jinying Guo, Teng Wang, Baogang Quan, Huan Zhao, Changzhi Gu, Junjie Li, Xinke Wang, Guohai Situ, Yan Zhang. Polarization multiplexing for double images display[J]. Opto-Electronic Advances, 2019, 2(7): 07180029.