Reprogrammable Holograms from Maskless Surface Photomorphing

Abstract

Holographic technologies have been envisioned as potentially impacting many areas of everyday life, including science, entertainment, and healthcare, but their adoption is still at an early stage. Recent achievements in flat optics research gave an unprecedented strength to this field, proposing holographic devices as light-modulating structured surfaces at micro and nanoscale. However, these components are typically static, requiring demanding, burdensome, and irreversible lithographic processes. Here a maskless lithographic framework is reported which only uses light irradiation to fabricate reprogrammable diffractive holographic projectors directly on the surface of a dielectric photomorphable polymer film. Lithographic and characterization optical schemes are combined to optimize in real-time the light-modulating performances of the surface, producing holograms with enhanced efficiency. Reprogrammable holograms are then demonstrated to change shape and position according to dynamical optical remorphing of the surface, realizing a proof-of-concept of a pixel-less morphological projector. The approach opens new routes for holographic image displaying and dynamic optical data encoding and sharing.