Poincaré sphere trajectory encoding metasurfaces based on generalized Malus’ law

Zi-Lan Deng (), Meng-Xia Hu, Shanfeng Qiu, Xianfeng Wu, Adam Overvig, Xiangping Li () and Andrea Alù ()
Additional contact information
Zi-Lan Deng: Jinan University
Meng-Xia Hu: Jinan University
Shanfeng Qiu: Shphotonics LLC
Xianfeng Wu: Shphotonics LLC
Adam Overvig: City University of New York
Xiangping Li: Jinan University
Andrea Alù: City University of New York

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract 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.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46758-y Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-46758-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46758-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().