Bilayer Triatomic Metasurface‐Driven Minimalist Full‐Channel Modulation of Jones Matrix

Abstract Full‐channel modulation of the Jones matrix via metasurface has important applications in optical communications, data storage and encryption, but remains a significant challenge. Here, a bilayer triatomic metasurface architecture is proposed for realizing minimalist full‐channel modulation of the Jones matrix. The meta‐atom consists of three high‐transmittance nanopillars, where two nanopillars in the same layer induce intra‐layer light field interference, and the third nanopillar in the adjacent layer breaks the planar symmetry of the meta‐atom. Nine physical degrees of freedom (DoFs), corresponding to the orthogonally polarized propagation phases and geometric phase of each nanopillar, are leveraged to realize full‐channel modulation, which features, to the best of the knowledge, the fewest DoFs and demonstrates superior optical efficiency. Furthermore, four‐channel photonic orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexing and eight‐channel image integration based on the proposed methodology are demonstrated. This work exhibits remarkable application potential in ultra‐high‐density information encoding and integration.