Polarization is a basic characteristic of electromagnetic waves that conveys much optical information owing to its many states. The polarization state is manipulated and controlled for optical information security, optical encryption, and optical communication. Metasurface devices provide a new way to manipulate wave-fronts of light. A single ultrathin metasurface device can generate and modulate several differently polarized light fields, and thus carries optical information in several different channels. Terahertz (THz) waves have become widely used as carrier waves for wireless communication. Compact and functional metasurface devices are in high demand for THz elements and systems. This paper proposes a tri-layer metallic THz metasurface for multi-channel polarization generation and phase modulation with a high efficiency of approximately 80%. An azimuthally polarized THz vectorial beam generator is realized and characterized for use as a THz polarization analyzer. The incident polarization angle can be observed graphically with high accuracy. Moreover, a vectorial hologram with eight channels for different linear polarization states is demonstrated experimentally. The information in different holograms can be hidden by choosing the polarization channel for detection. This work contributes to achieving multi-functional metasurface in the THz band and can benefit THz communication and optical information security.

We propose an asymmetric optical image encryption scheme that uses an amplitude and phase mixture retrieval of the Yang–Gu algorithm. The encryption process is realized by employing a cascaded Yang–Gu algorithm together with two random phase masks that serve as the public encryption keys. The two private keys are generated in the encryption process and are randomly distributed binary matrices to be used for performing one-way binary phase modulations. Without the private keys, illegal users cannot retrieve the secret image. Numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the validity and security of the proposed scheme.

We demonstrate that hollow Gaussian beams can be obtained from Fourier transform of the differentials of a Gaussian beam, and thus they can be generated by spatial filtering in the Fourier domain with spatial filters that consist of binomial combinations of even-order Hermite polynomials. A typical $4f$ optical system and a Michelson interferometer type system are proposed to implement the proposed scheme. Numerical results have proved the validity and effectiveness of this method. Furthermore, other polynomial Gaussian beams can also be generated by using this scheme. This approach is simple and may find significant applications in generating the dark hollow beams for nanophotonic technology.

We propose a novel random fractional Fourier transform by randomizing the transform kernel function of the conventional fractional Fourier transform. The random fractional Fourier transform inherits the excellent mathematical properties from the fractional Fourier transform and can be easily implemented in optics. As a primary application the random fractional Fourier transform can be directly used in optical image encryption and decryption. The double phase encoding image encryption schemes can thus be modeled with cascaded random fractional Fourier transformers.