Metasurfaces can independently manipulate the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light at the subwavelength scale, providing an important platform for advancing holography from conventional scalar control to vectorial control. Advanced vectorial holography with fully customizable wavefronts and polarization distributions has emerged as a key technology for advanced displays and optical encryption. However, existing metasurface-based vectorial holography mainly operates in the visible or near-infrared regions. In the ultraviolet, especially the deep-ultraviolet region, commonly used dielectric materials suffer from strong short-wavelength absorption, low device efficiency, and insufficient environmental stability, making it difficult to realize high-quality and broadband vectorial holographic control.

To address this challenge, the research teams led by Prof. Chongxin Shan and Prof. Peinan Ni at Zhengzhou University, in collaboration with the team led by Prof. Yiyang Xie at Beijing University of Technology, proposed and experimentally demonstrated a broadband vectorial holography scheme based on diamond metasurfaces. Taking advantage of diamond’s wide bandgap of 5.43 eV, high deep-ultraviolet transmittance, high laser damage threshold, and excellent chemical and environmental stability, the researchers introduced pixelated sub-region design, phase-engineered metasurface waveplates, and polarization multiplexing into a diamond nanostructure platform, realizing vectorial holographic imaging from the visible to the deep-ultraviolet region.

The key results of this work include the following: the authors first designed and fabricated a diamond broadband vectorial meta-holographic device with a size of 300 × 300 μm². By using a pixelated sub-region method, multiple polarization states, including x-polarization, y-polarization, left-handed circular polarization, and right-handed circular polarization, were encoded into the “ZZU” and diamond patterns. The continuous broadband operation from the deep ultraviolet to the visible region was experimentally verified at multiple wavelengths, including 261, 325, 460, 532, and 633 nm. Furthermore, the authors constructed a six-petal flower-shaped vectorial hologram at 261 nm in the deep-ultraviolet region, in which six different polarization states were encoded into different petals, realizing multi-polarization deep-ultraviolet holographic display. In addition, the study demonstrated polarization-multiplexed deep-ultraviolet holography, displaying “META” in the x-polarization channel and “Diamond” in the y-polarization channel, proving that diamond metasurfaces can achieve independent information encoding and reading in different polarization channels in the deep-ultraviolet region.

This work provides a new ultracompact optical platform for high-density optical storage, secure communication, ultraviolet information encryption, and display systems operating in extreme environments. The work, entitled“Broadband Vectorial Holography from the Visible to the Deep Ultraviolet Region Using Diamond Metasurfaces,”was published in ACS Nano on April 23, 2026.