Multichannel metasurfaces become one of the most significant development trends, as they exhibit versatile manipulation abilities on electromagnetic fields and provide a promising approach to constitute compact devices with various complex functions, especially in optical encryption due to its capabilities of multichannel, high complexity, and high concealment. However, the existent multichannel metasurfaces based optical encryption technology can only realize two channels in the near‐field, or perform three channels in near‐ and far‐field. In this paper, a four‐channel display metasurface used to encrypt information by three optical parameters as security keys is firstly proposed and experimentally demonstrated, which is different from the previous three‐channel metasurface combined nanoprinting and hologram in near‐ and far‐field. The novel design strategy of the four‐channel metasurface can effectively enhance the information capacity and increase the difficulty of leaks without causing manufacturing challenges and additional costs. In addition, the simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the designed metasurface with four independent channels can separately display distinguishable nanoprinting images under decoding keys of special optical parameters. The proposed four‐channel display metasurface with advantages of high capacity and ultracompactness will pave a way for multichannel applications in nano display, information storage, optical anticounterfeiting, and other relevant fields.
Phononic crystals are a kind of artificial acoustic metamaterial whose mass density and elastic modulus are periodically arranged. The precise and efficient design of phononic crystals with specific bandgap characteristics has attracted increasing attention in past decades. In this paper, an improved adaptive genetic algorithm is proposed for the reverse customization of two-dimensional phononic crystals designed to maximize the relative bandwidth at low frequencies. The energy band dispersion relation and transmission loss of the optimal structure are calculated by the finite-element method, and the effective wave-attenuation effect in the bandgap range is verified. This provides a solution for the custom-made design of acoustic metamaterials with excellent low-frequency bandgap sound insulation or other engineering applications.
Taking advantage of the flexible customization of dynamic and Pancharatnam–Berry phases on meta-atoms, spin-decoupled multifunctional metasurfaces have been realized for optical beams of orthogonal circularly polarized lights, which promotes the diverse development of nanophotonic devices. To date, spin-decoupled metasurfaces can only spatially split and deflect beams in coplanar directions not in non-coplanar, limiting further applications. Here, a single metasurface is proposed to experimentally as well as numerically demonstrate the spin-decoupled omnidirectional anomalous refraction. The results indicate that the three-dimensionally omnidirectional dual-beam refractions are attributed to arbitrary engineering of spin-independent phase gradients along any in-plane orientations of the single metasurface. It is believed that the proposed spin-decoupled omnidirectional metasurfaces are promising candidates for multifunctional applications in compact spin-based nanophotonic systems, such as polarized beam splitting, steering, and polarimeter.
At optical frequencies, we design an anisotropic metasurface to realize high-Q perfect absorption in numerical calculation. By establishing the Norton equivalent network model, we first reveal that the root cause of this phenomenon is the coupling excitation of the localized surface plasmon (LSP) mode and the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) mode. This absorber can realize bifunctional switching and is expected to realize the energy conversion of photons–SPP–photons. Meanwhile, we analyze the control of the structural design on high-Q perfect absorption. This research will provide theoretical guidance for the further development of applications related to high-Q perfect absorption such as absorption filters with specific wavelengths and narrow band photon emitters.
The polarization of light, the vector nature of electromagnetic waves, is one of the fundamental parameters. Finding a direct and efficient method to measure the state of polarized light is extremely urgent for nano-optical applications. Based on Malus’s law, we design an ultracompact metasurface composed of silver nanorods, which is demonstrated to directly measure the state of linear polarization by a grayscale image. Using an ultrathin metasurface, we generate grayscale images with gradient grayscale levels which are linked directly to the polarization state of the incident light. The direction of the linear polarization of incident light can be conveniently and efficiently obtained through extracting the angle of the brightest area of the grayscale image. The ultrathin metasurface operates in the broadband 750–1100 nm spectral range. It is a novel and significant method to analyze the linear polarization state of light, which provides opportunities for various applications, such as polarimetric multispectral imaging and miniaturized polarimeter.