Quantum technologies rely on creating and manipulating entangled sources, which are essential for quantum information, communication, and imaging. By integrating quantum technologies and all-dielectric metasurfaces, the performance of miniature display devices can be enhanced to a higher level. Miniature display technology, such as virtual reality display, has achieved original commercial success, and was initially applied to immersive games and interactive scenes. While the consumer market has quickly adopted this technology, several areas remain for improvement, including concerns around bulkiness, dual-channel display, and noise reduction. Here, we experimentally realize a quantum meta-hologram concept demonstration of a miniature display. We fabricate an ultracompact meta-hologram based on 1 μm thick titanium dioxide (TiO2). The meta-hologram can be remotely switched with heralding technique and is robust against noise with the quantum entangled source. The platform can alter the miniature display channel by manipulating heralding photons’ polarization, removing speckles and multiple reflective light noise, improving imaging contrast, and potentially decreasing device weight. Imaging contrast increases from 0.36 dB under speckle noise influences to 6.8 dB in quantum correlation imaging. This approach has the potential to miniaturize quantum displays and quantum communication devices.
Quantum technologies rely on creating and manipulating entangled sources, which are essential for quantum information, communication, and imaging. By integrating quantum technologies and all-dielectric metasurfaces, the performance of miniature display devices can be enhanced to a higher level. Miniature display technology, such as virtual reality display, has achieved original commercial success, and was initially applied to immersive games and interactive scenes. While the consumer market has quickly adopted this technology, several areas remain for improvement, including concerns around bulkiness, dual-channel display, and noise reduction. Here, we experimentally realize a quantum meta-hologram concept demonstration of a miniature display. We fabricate an ultracompact meta-hologram based on 1 μm thick titanium dioxide (TiO2). The meta-hologram can be remotely switched with heralding technique and is robust against noise with the quantum entangled source. The platform can alter the miniature display channel by manipulating heralding photons’ polarization, removing speckles and multiple reflective light noise, improving imaging contrast, and potentially decreasing device weight. Imaging contrast increases from 0.36 dB under speckle noise influences to 6.8 dB in quantum correlation imaging. This approach has the potential to miniaturize quantum displays and quantum communication devices.
Metasurfaces can precisely manipulate the amplitude, phase, and polarization of incident light through subwavelength structures, greatly advancing the quantum meta-holographic imaging. However, the current methods of using quantum holography only control either the amplitude or the phase on the imaging plane, so the resulted scalar holography without the polarization distribution has limited imaging channels. Here, the vectorial meta-holography using entangled signal-idler photon pairs is experimentally demonstrated to realize remotely controlled multi-channel quantum imaging. By simultaneous control of the amplitude ratio between two cross-polarization holographic images and their phase difference on the image plane, the polarization distribution accordingly changes with the incident polarization state. The accurate correspondence ensures the correct reconstruction of 32 incident polarization states with an average fidelity up to 94.78%. This enables entangled idler photons to remotely control the holographic images reconstructed by the entangled signal photons, where the signal-to-noise ratio is as high as 10.78 dB, even for maximally mixed quantum states. This vectorial meta-holography using entangled states has a larger polarization state information capacity and will facilitate miniaturized quantum imaging and efficient quantum state tomography.
Quantum imaging leverages entanglement and photon correlations to surpass classical limits in resolution and noise performance. However, its practical deployment is constrained by bulky optical setups and limited system adaptability. Metasurfaces—ultrathin, subwavelength-structured devices—offer a compact and reconfigurable solution for wavefront control in quantum light fields. This review presents recent advances in geometric-, propagation-, and hybrid-phase metasurface designs, showcasing their contributions to enhanced spatial resolution, improved visibility, and system miniaturization across applications such as ghost imaging, quantum holography, and single-photon microscopy. It also examines key challenges—including photon loss, fabrication-induced phase noise, and the lack of dynamic tunability—while outlining future directions for developing integrated, noise-resilient, and task-specific quantum imaging platforms.
Phase contrast microscopy is essential in optical imaging, but traditional systems are bulky and limited by single-phase modulation, hindering visualization of complex specimens.Metasurfaces, with their subwavelength structures, offer compact integration and versatile light field control.Quantum imaging further enhances performance by leveraging nonclassical photon correlations to suppress classical noise, improve contrast, and enable multifunctional processing.Here, we report, a dual-mode bright-dark phase contrast imaging scheme enabled by quantum metasurface synergy.By combining polarization entanglement from quantum light sources with metasurface phase modulation, our method achieves highcontrast, adaptive bright-dark phase contrast imaging of transparent samples with arbitrary phase distributions under low-light conditions.Compared to classical weak light imaging, quantum illumination suppresses environmental noise at equivalent photon flux, improving the contrast from 0.22 to 0.81.Moreover, quantum polarization entanglement enables remote switching to ensure high-contrast imaging in at least one mode, supporting dynamic observation of biological cells with complex phase structures.This capability is especially valuable in scenarios where physical intervention is difficult, such as in miniaturized systems, in vivo platforms, or extreme environments.Overall, the proposed scheme offers an efficient noninvasive solution for biomedical imaging with strong potential in life science applications.
Quantum imaging has non-negligible advantages in terms of sensitivity, signal-to-noise ratio, and novel imaging schemes. Based on metasurfaces, the information density and stability of the quantum imaging system can be further improved. Here we experimentally demonstrate that two patterns, simultaneously and independently superimposed on a high-efficiency dielectric metasurface, can be remotely switched via polarization-entangled photon pairs. Furthermore, using the time-correlated property of entangled photon pairs, the information carried by quantum light can be remarkably discriminated from background noise. This work confirms that the phase manipulation of quantum light with metasurfaces has a huge potential in the field of quantum imaging, quantum state tomography, and also promises real-world quantum metasurface devices.
Photonic quantum information processing relies on operating the quantum state of photons, which usually involves bulky optical components unfavorable for system miniaturization and integration. Here, we report on the transformation and distribution of polarization-entangled photon pairs with multichannel dielectric metasurfaces. The entangled photon pairs interact with metasurface building blocks, where the geometrical-scaling-induced phase gradients are imposed, and are transformed into two-photon entangled states with the desired polarization. Two metasurfaces, each simultaneously distributing polarization-entangled photons to spatially separated multiple channels M (N), may accomplish M×N channels of entanglement distribution and transformation. Experimentally we demonstrate 2×2 and 4×4 distributed entanglement states, including Bell states and superposition of Bell states, with high fidelity and strong polarization correlation. We expect this approach paves the way for future integration of quantum information networks.
Abstract Metasurfaces utilize engineered nanostructures to achieve control on all possible dimensions of light, encouraging versatile applications, including beam steering, multifunctional lensing, and multiplexed holograms. Towards the quantum optical regime for metasurfaces, although significant efforts have been put into generating and analyzing specific quantum states, control schemes to further manipulate these quantum states or information are still limited. Here, based on a metasurface, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a continuous heralding scheme to remotely control a vortex beam with high robustness to noise using polarization-entangled photon pairs. Our metasurface entangles polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM) and the polarization selection on heralding photon erases the which-OAM information on signal photon. It induces an interference of two different OAM states remotely, manifesting a continuous orbital rotation. Our results show that metasurfaces have potential applications in quantum communication and information processing in entangling information with increasing complexity in the content.