Holography plays a crucial role in optics, yet traditional methods require complex setups and bulky devices, being unfavourable for optical integration. Although metasurface-based holograms can be ultra-compact, holographic images generated by previously realized metadevices were mostly scalar ones, with a few vectorial holograms realized so far suffering from restrictions on efficiency, incident polarization, and resolution. We propose and experimentally demonstrate an efficient meta-platform to generate vectorial holographic images with high resolutions under arbitrary incident polarizations. Combining Gerchberg–Saxton algorithm and the wave-decomposition technique, we establish a generic strategy to retrieve the optical properties (e.g., reflection phases and polarization-conversion capabilities) of meta-atoms required to construct a metasurface for generating a predesigned vectorial holographic image under a predesigned incident polarization. We next design a series of high-efficiency and deep-subwavelength single-structure meta-atoms exhibiting tailored reflection phases and polarization-conversion capabilities governed by both structural resonances and the Pancharatnam–Berry effect, and experimentally characterize their optical scattering properties. We finally construct a series of ultra-thin metadevices with these meta-atoms and experimentally demonstrate that they can generate pre-designed vectorial holographic images under illuminations of circularly polarized light at 1064 nm. We provide a highly efficient and ultra-thin platform to generate predesigned vectorial holographic images under illuminations of light with arbitrary given polarization, which can inspire numerous future applications in on-chip photonics.
Liu et al. (2025) studied this question.