Noise is usually undesired yet inevitable in science and engineering. However, by introducing the engineered noise to the precise solution of Jones matrix elements, we break the fundamental limit of polarization multiplexing capacity of metasurfaces that roots from the dimension constraints of the Jones matrix. We experimentally demonstrate up to 11 independent holographic images using a single metasurface illuminated by visible light with different polarizations. To the best of our knowledge, it is the highest capacity reported for polarization multiplexing. Combining the position multiplexing scheme, the metasurface can generate 36 distinct images, forming a holographic keyboard pattern. This discovery implies a new paradigm for high-capacity optical display, information encryption, and data storage.
By combining the advantages of both a metallic metamaterial and a dielectric interlayer, we demonstrate the general mechanism to construct the dispersion-free metastructure, in which the intrinsic dispersion of the metallic structures is perfectly cancelled out by the thickness-dependent dispersion of the dielectric spacing layer. As examples to apply this concept, a broadband quarter-wave plate and a half-wave plate are demonstrated. By selecting the structural parameters, the polarization state of light can be freely tuned across a broad frequency range, and all of the polarization states on the Poincaré sphere can be realized dispersion free.
We explore an analogue of optical frequency combs in driven nonlinear phononic systems, and present a mechanism for generating phononic frequency combs through nonlinear resonances. In the underlying process, a set of phonon modes is simultaneously excited by the external driving which yields frequency combs with an array of discrete and equidistant spectral lines of each nonlinearly excited phonon mode. Frequency combs through nonlinear resonance of different orders are investigated, and in particular the possibility of correlation tailoring in higher-order cases is revealed. We suggest that our results can be applied in various nonlinear acoustic processes, such as phonon harvesting, and can also be generalized to other nonlinear systems.