In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to the ability of metasurface optics to manipulate polarized light. A variety of works and applications have been demonstrated showing, for instance, how metasurfaces can create optics with different behaviors that switch on the basis of light's polarization state, or that produce polarized holograms.

In recent work published in Science Advances, we show that a new perspective - which we dub "Jones matrix holography" - generalizes much of this past work and suggests new possibilties as well that exceed the level of control enacted by previous approaches. Some of these include devices generating holograms whose far-fields are arbitrarily polarization-switchable and a metasurface whose far-field contains all possible waveplate-like transformations. This work could enable custom polarization-dependence in any optical system, from telescopes to microscopes, and even lasers.

Read the paper in Science Advances here and check out a press release from Harvard SEAS here.