Reprogrammable Vector Optical Field Meets Planar Liquid Crystal Elements for Enhanced Security in Holography

Abstract As information security becomes an increasingly challenging and highly prioritized issue, optical holographic encryption has recently attracted significant attention. In particular, vector holography exploits the vector properties of light to overcome the limitations of traditional scalar holography, enhancing the dimensionality of optical encryption and improving the security. However, current vector holographic encryption methods focus solely on the design of metasurfaces or liquid crystal (LC) devices, without fully considering the interaction between the incidence and device, thereby limiting the available encryption channels. Vector optical field, which has arbitrarily designed wavefronts and polarization state distributions, provides greater degrees of control than uniform scalar field. In this work, traditional vector holographic encryption integrates with vector optical field to propose the secure holography by directly encoding vector information into a reprogrammable vector incidence. This method involves dividing and distributing secret information among various secret carriers, namely the vector optical field, the LC device, and the analyzer. By encoding the vector properties of the incidence and the orientation of the analyzer's transmission axis, multi‐channel vector encryption holography is achieved utilizing a static LC device. The proposal provides a promising pathway for advancing optical information encryption, strengthening authentication capabilities, and enhancing overall information security.