Minimalist design of multifunctional metasurfaces for helicity multiplexed holography and nanoprinting

Recently, polarization multiplexing has become a common strategy to enhance the information capacity of metasurfaces. Nevertheless, the intricate design of anisotropic nanostructures forming a polarization multiplexed metasurface poses a significant challenge, increasing the requirements for manufacturing processes and diminishing overall robustness. Herein, we present a minimalist metasurface comprised of only two kinds of nanostructures to achieve the integration of continuous-amplitude modulated nanoprinting and eight-step phase-only helicity-multiplexed holography. Specifically, the nanoprinting image governed by Malus's law can be observed in the orthogonally polarized light path, while holographic images can be switched by changing the chirality of the incident circularly polarized light. More importantly, the geometric phase and the propagation phase of the metasurface are optimized simultaneously according to the target images. Thus, the metasurface does not require optimizing many kinds of nanostructures to achieve the phase but only needs two kinds of nanostructures, forming a minimalist metasurface that significantly relieves the design and fabrication burden. Moreover, the proposed methodology is universal and applicable not only in polarization multiplexing but also in other multi-channel multiplexing technologies. Consequently, the proposed scheme holds promising applications in image display, information encryption, data storage, anti-counterfeiting, and more.