Nanoscale polarization manipulation and encryption based on dielectric metasurfaces

Manipulating the polarization of light is highly desired for versatile applications ranging from super resolution, optical trapping, to particle acceleration. The enormous freedom in metasurface design motivates the implementation of polarization control in ultrathin and compact optical systems. However, the majority of proposed strategies based on metasurfaces have been demonstrated only a spatially homogeneous polarization generation, while less attention has been devoted to spatially variant inhomogeneous vector beams. Here, we demonstrate a novel method for generating arbitrary radial and azimuthal polarization beams with high efficiencies of up to 80% by utilizing transmission-type dielectric metasurfaces. Polarization conversion metasurfaces are suitable candidates for the implementation of polarization encryption, which we demonstrate by encoding a hidden image into the spatial polarization distribution. In addition, we show that the image pattern can be modified by appropriate polarization selection of the transmitted light. Such a method may provide a practical technique for a variety of applications such as imaging, encryption and anti-counterfeiting.