Immersive Tuning the Guided Waves for Multifunctional On‐Chip Metaoptics

Abstract With the great promise to reshape the landscape of photonic integrated circuits (PIC), the introduction of metasurface onto optical waveguide integration gives rise to tremendous potential functionalities via converting the guided waves to free‐space, including directional beam‐steering, mode‐conversion, optical on‐chip router, etc. Despite these endeavors, on‐chip metaoptics still faces critical challenges to achieve multifunctionalities with dynamic switchable ability between arbitrary‐encoding channels. Here, a series of novel on‐chip metaoptics functionalities are originally proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Through utilizing a serial optimization algorithm of computer‐generated hologram (CGH), a 3D hologram with multiple sliced information channels is successfully enabled to project above the on‐chip space. Moreover, by strategically exploring water immersive tuning scheme, on‐chip dynamic tuning in real‐time is realized for dual‐channel arbitrary‐encoded hologram, practically verified as a large‐scale easy‐accessible switch method. Eventually, the encoding freedom is further expanded by breaking the degeneracy of forward/backward guided propagations, beyond the state‐of‐art of multiplexing and information storage capacity. This study can easily find paths to numerous practical applications in the next generation of AR display, 3D vision, optical storage, and photonics integrated devices.