Hybrid State Engineering of Phase-Change Metasurface for All-Optical Cryptography

Chalcogenide material Ge₂Sb₂Te₅ (GST) has bistable phases, the so-called amorphous and crystalline phases that exhibit large refractive index contrast. It can be reversibly switched within a nanosecond time scale through applying thermal bias, especially optical or electrical pulse signals. Recently, GST has been exploited as an ingredient of all-optical dynamic metasurfaces, thanks to its ultrafast and efficient switching functionality. However, most of these devices provide only two-level switching functionality and this limitation hinders their application to diverse all-optical systems. In this paper, the method to expand switching functionality of GST metasurfaces to three level through engineering thermo-optically creatable hybrid state that is co-existing state of amorphous and crystalline GST-based meta-atoms is proposed. Furthermore, the novel hologram technique is introduced for providing the visual information that is only recognizable in the hybrid state GST metasurface. Thanks to thermo-optical complexity to make the hybrid state, the metasurface allows the realization of highly secured visual cryptography architecture without the complex optical setup. The phase-change metasurface based on multi-physical design has significant potential for applications such as all-optical image encryption, security, and anti-counterfeiting.