Vectorial‐Manipulating Encryption for Multi‐Channel Capacity and Security Enhancement

Abstract Emerging meta‐optics unfold unprecedented capabilities in optical display, information storage, and encryption applications. Particularly, the recent advances in vectorial holography based on the multi‐parameter manipulation of the Jones matrix have increased the modulation space and information capacity. However, the fundamental degree of freedom (DoF) extreme limit in the optical encoding space of the Jones matrix bottlenecks the information capacity for high‐demand practical applications. To further expand the high‐volume encryption with enhanced security, here, a vectorial‐manipulating encryption strategy is proposed to originally demonstrate multi‐channel encryption and display. By ingeniously utilizing multi‐beam overlapping and precisely controlling their phase differences in the overlapping area, the capacity expansion of up to 12‐channel near‐/far‐field optical images is enabled. Such vectorial‐manipulating strategy is also applied to near‐field nanoprinting and realizes additional encrypted nanoprinting information. More intriguingly, the optical encryption will not be decrypted unless setting with a particular combination of input/output polarization keys, thus enhancing its concealment security beyond the conventional encryption. Overall, the proposed vectorial‐manipulating strategy expands the state‐of‐the‐art storage capacity with enhanced decipher security and potentially suggests a new path for the next‐generation optical storage and encryption security applications.