TY - JOUR
T1 - Poincaré sphere trajectory encoding metasurfaces based on generalized Malus’ law
AU - Deng, Zi Lan
AU - Hu, Meng Xia
AU - Qiu, Shanfeng
AU - Wu, Xianfeng
AU - Overvig, Adam
AU - Li, Xiangping
AU - Alù, Andrea
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024.
PY - 2024/12
Y1 - 2024/12
N2 - As a fundamental property of light, polarization serves as an excellent information encoding carrier, playing significant roles in many optical applications, including liquid crystal displays, polarization imaging, optical computation and encryption. However, conventional polarization information encoding schemes based on Malus’ law usually consider 1D polarization projections on a linear basis, implying that their encoding flexibility is largely limited. Here, we propose a Poincaré sphere (PS) trajectory encoding approach with metasurfaces that leverages a generalized form of Malus’ law governing universal 2D projections between arbitrary elliptical polarization pairs spanning the entire PS. Arbitrary polarization encodings are realized by engineering PS trajectories governed by either arbitrary analytic functions or aligned modulation grids of interest, leading to versatile polarization image transformation functionalities, including histogram stretching, thresholding and image encryption within non-orthogonal PS loci. Our work significantly expands the encoding dimensionality of polarization information, unveiling new opportunities for metasurfaces in polarization optics for both quantum and classical regimes.
AB - As a fundamental property of light, polarization serves as an excellent information encoding carrier, playing significant roles in many optical applications, including liquid crystal displays, polarization imaging, optical computation and encryption. However, conventional polarization information encoding schemes based on Malus’ law usually consider 1D polarization projections on a linear basis, implying that their encoding flexibility is largely limited. Here, we propose a Poincaré sphere (PS) trajectory encoding approach with metasurfaces that leverages a generalized form of Malus’ law governing universal 2D projections between arbitrary elliptical polarization pairs spanning the entire PS. Arbitrary polarization encodings are realized by engineering PS trajectories governed by either arbitrary analytic functions or aligned modulation grids of interest, leading to versatile polarization image transformation functionalities, including histogram stretching, thresholding and image encryption within non-orthogonal PS loci. Our work significantly expands the encoding dimensionality of polarization information, unveiling new opportunities for metasurfaces in polarization optics for both quantum and classical regimes.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-024-46758-y
DO - 10.1038/s41467-024-46758-y
M3 - Article
C2 - 38493161
AN - SCOPUS:85187941922
VL - 15
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 2380
ER -