Full-color, large area, transmissive holograms enabled by multi-level diffractive optics

We show that multi-level diffractive microstructures can enable broadband, on-axis transmissive holograms that can project complex full-color images, which are invariant to viewing angle. Compared to alternatives like metaholograms, diffractive holograms utilize much larger minimum features (>10 µm), much smaller aspect ratios (<0.2) and thereby, can be fabricated in a single lithography step over relatively large areas (>30 mm ×30 mm). We designed, fabricated and characterized holograms that encode various full-color images. Our devices demonstrate absolute transmission efficiencies of >86% across the visible spectrum from 405 nm to 633 nm (peak value of about 92%), and excellent color fidelity. Furthermore, these devices do not exhibit polarization dependence. Finally, we emphasize that our devices exhibit negligible absorption and are phase-only holograms with high diffraction efficiency.