Multi‐Channel Holography Enabled by Interlayer‐Correlated Liquid Crystal Elements for Nested Optical Encryption

Abstract

ABSTRACT Liquid crystal (LC) planar devices have emerged as an attractive ultra‐thin platform for optical encryption. However, most existing LC‐based holographic encryption schemes rely on conventional multiplexing strategies with limited design freedom and weak interlayer collaboration, hindering the further advancement of holography toward greater information capacity and higher security. Herein, we propose an interlayer‐correlated LC planar platform, where the phase profiles of three LC devices are jointly optimized to generate three near‐field display patterns and six far‐field holographic images. More importantly, the scalability of this platform is validated experimentally, yielding 24 distinct images by integrating conventional multiplexing techniques. Furthermore, 39 high‐fidelity images are numerically achieved by increasing the number of reconstruction distances and exploiting the non‐commutative property of Jones matrix multiplication. Based on the proposed multi‐channel LC platform, we further develop a nested optical encryption scheme with ultra‐high security. Revelation of the final encrypted information requires joint decryption by three authorized technicians across multiple critical dimensions. Consequently, this work establishes a scalable LC platform for high‐density data storage, demonstrating great application potential in information display, identity authentication, and optical encryption.