Nature Commun. 4, 2808 (2013)

Metasurfaces — engineered monolayers with custom-designed optical properties — offer a new medium for performing high-resolution holography, according to Lingling Huang and a team of researchers from the UK, China, Germany and Singapore. They report how metasurfaces composed of an array of subwavelength metallic nanoantennas are proving valuable for performing three-dimensional holography at visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The nanoantennas serve as pixels, and their orientation angle stores the phase information needed to recreate the hologram. Experiments were performed with an array of gold antennas that had dimensions of 150 × 75 nm2. The information required to create a three-dimensional airplane model that was a few hundred micrometres in size was stored in the orientation of the antennas during fabrication of the metasurface hologram. The hologram consisted of 800 × 800 pixels, and had a lattice constant of 500 nm. The images were reconstructed at wavelengths of 670 nm, 810 nm and 950 nm. Importantly, the use of a metasurface eliminated the undesirable effect of multiple diffraction orders that usually accompany holography.