Chiral Grayscale Imaging Based on a Versatile Metasurface of Spin-Selective Manipulation

Metasurface display, a kind of unique imaging technique with subwavelength scale, plays a key role in data storage, information processing, and optical imaging due to the superior performance of high resolution, miniaturization, and integration. Recent works about grayscale imaging as a typical metasurface display have showcased an excellent performance for optical integrated devices in the near field. However, chiral grayscale imaging has been rarely elucidated, especially using a single structure. Here, a novel method is proposed to display a continuously chiral grayscale imaging that is adjusted by a metasurface consisting of a single chiral structure with optimized geometric parameters. The simulation results show that the incident light can be nearly converted into its cross-polarized reflection when the chiral structural variable parameters are <i>α</i> = 80° and <i>β</i> = 45°. The versatile metasurface can arbitrarily and independently realize the spin-selective manipulation of wavelength and amplitude of circularly polarized light. Due to the excellent manipulation ability of the versatile metasurface, a kind of circularly polarized light detection and a two-channel encoded display with different operating wavelengths are presented. More importantly, this versatile metasurface can also be used to show high-resolution chiral grayscale imaging, which distinguishes it from the results of previous grayscale imaging studies about linearly polarized incident illumination. The proposed versatile metasurface of spin-selective manipulation, with the advantages of high resolution, large capacity, and monolithic integration, provides a novel way for polarization detection, optical display, information storage, and other relevant fields.