Bilayer Triatomic Metasurface-Driven Minimalist Full-Channel Modulation of Jones Matrix

Abstract

Full-channel modulation of the Jones matrix via metasurface has important applications in optical communications, data storage and encryption, but remains a significant challenge. Here, a bilayer triatomic metasurface architecture is proposed for realizing minimalist full-channel modulation of the Jones matrix. The meta-atom consists of three high-transmittance nanopillars, where two nanopillars in the same layer induce intra-layer light field interference, and the third nanopillar in the adjacent layer breaks the planar symmetry of the meta-atom. Nine physical degrees of freedom (DoFs), corresponding to the orthogonally polarized propagation phases and geometric phase of each nanopillar, are leveraged to realize full-channel modulation, which features, to the best of the knowledge, the fewest DoFs and demonstrates superior optical efficiency. Furthermore, four-channel photonic orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexing and eight-channel image integration based on the proposed methodology are demonstrated. This work exhibits remarkable application potential in ultra-high-density information encoding and integration.