Single-size nanostructured metasurface for dual-channel vortex beam generation

Under the government of Malus’s law, metasurfaces composed of anisotropic nanostructures acting as nano-polarizers have shown their precise optical manipulation of polarization profile of incident light at the nanoscale. The orientation degeneracy implied in Malus’s law provides a new design degree of freedom for polarization multiplexing, which can be employed to design amplitude-modulated multiplexing meta-devices. Herein, we experimentally demonstrate this concept by encoding two independent amplitude profiles into a single metasurface under different polarization controls, merely with a single-size nanostructure design approach. Hence, the multiplexing metasurface functions as two independent fork gratings to generate two vortex beams with different topological charges, and the two channels can be readily switched by rotating the metasurface sample around its optical axis from 0° to 45° or vice versa. The proposed metasurface for vortex beam generation enjoys advantages including high resolution, ultracompactness, dual-channel information capacity, and ultrasimple nanostructures, and it can be extended to a variety of practical applications in information multiplexing, orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexing communication, quantum information processing, etc.