Color Printing and Encryption with Polarization-Switchable Structural Colors on All-Dielectric Metasurfaces

Abstract

Metasurface-based structural color with high resolution is promising for color printing and encryption. However, achieving tunable structural colors in practical applications is challenging owing to the immutability after the fabrication of metasurfaces. Herein, we proposed the polarization-switchable dielectric metasurfaces with full colors. The colorful images can be switched on/off by controlling the polarization of incident light. For the nanorods metasurfaces, all colors turned to black in the "off" mode because of the near-zero reflection, and the uniform black was advantageous for designing encryption applications. For the nanocrosses metasurfaces, colors reversed in two different "on" modes and images hidden in the "off" mode. With the polarization-sensitive metasurfaces, a fish-bird image, an overlapped dual-channel image, and a green-red heart image were obtained, respectively. The demonstrations can be applied to dynamic displays, optical cryptography, multichannel imaging, and optical data storage.