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Orbital angular momentum holography for high-security encryption

Abstract

Holography has been identified as a vital platform for three-dimensional displays, optical encryption, microscopy and artificial intelligence through different physical dimensions. However, unlike the wavelength and polarization divisions, orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light, despite its helical wavefront being an independent physical dimension, has not been implemented as an information carrier for holography due to the lack of helical mode index selectivity in the Bragg diffraction formula. Here, we demonstrate OAM holography by discovering strong OAM selectivity in the spatial-frequency domain without a theoretical helical mode index limit. As such, OAM holography allows the multiplexing of a wide range of OAM-dependent holographic images with a helical mode index spanning from −50 to 50, leading to a 10 bit OAM-encoded hologram for high-security optical encryption. Our results showing up to 210 OAM-dependent distinctive holographic images mark a new path to achieving ultrahigh-capacity holographic information systems harnessing the previously inaccessible OAM division.

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Fig. 1: Principle of OAM holography through the spatial-frequency domain.
Fig. 2: Design principle of OAM-preserved and -selective holograms.
Fig. 3: Holographic encoding of independent OAM information channels for a multiplexed display.
Fig. 4: Experimental demonstration of using a 10 bit OAM-multiplexing hologram for high-security holographic encryption.

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Data availability

All data related to the experiments described in this article are archived on a lab computer at RMIT University. All data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The code used for the hologram design is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank H.T. Luan and H.C. Yang for technical assistance with the experiment and B.K. Wang, Y. Zhang, C. Xu, T.X. Wang and J.T. Ma for useful discussions. M.G. acknowledges support from the Australian Research Council (ARC) through the Discovery Project (DP180102402). X.F. acknowledges support from a scholarship from the China Scholarship Council (CSC no. 201706190189). H.R. acknowledges funding support from a Victoria Fellowship and a Humboldt Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

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Contributions

M.G. and H.R. proposed the idea and conceived the experiment. X.F. and H.R. performed the theoretical calculations. X.F. constructed the experiment, acquired the data and carried out the data analysis. X.F., H.R. and M.G. completed the writing of the paper.

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Correspondence to Min Gu.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Notes 1–11 and Figs. 1–15

Supplementary Video 1

OAM-switched dynamic display.

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Fang, X., Ren, H. & Gu, M. Orbital angular momentum holography for high-security encryption. Nat. Photonics 14, 102–108 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-019-0560-x

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