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posted by mrpg on Monday January 01 2018, @09:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the next:two-objects-in-the-same-space dept.

A team at Caltech has figured out a way to encode more than one holographic image in a single surface without any loss of resolution. The engineering feat overturns a long-held assumption that a single surface could only project a single image regardless of the angle of illumination.

The technology hinges on the ability of a carefully engineered surface to reflect light differently depending on the angle at which incoming light strikes that surface.

[...] Led by Andrei Faraon, assistant professor of applied physics and materials science in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, the team developed silicon oxide and aluminum surfaces studded with tens of millions of tiny silicon posts, each just hundreds of nanometers tall. (For scale, a strand of human hair is 100,000 nanometers wide.) Each nanopost reflects light differently due to variations in its shape and size, and based on the angle of incoming light.

That last property allows each post to act as a pixel in more than one image: for example, acting as a black pixel if incoming light strikes the surface at 0 degrees and a white pixel if incoming light strikes the surface at 30 degrees.

"Each post can do double duty. This is how we're able to have more than one image encoded in the same surface with no loss of resolution," says Faraon (BS '04), senior author of a paper on the new material published by Physical Review X on December 7.

Seyedeh Mahsa Kamali et al, Angle-Multiplexed Metasurfaces: Encoding Independent Wavefronts in a Single Metasurface under Different Illumination Angles, Physical Review X (2017). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.7.041056

Source: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-holograms-surface.html


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  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday January 02 2018, @03:25PM

    by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday January 02 2018, @03:25PM (#616728) Homepage Journal

    I'll grant that color is not a physical dimension of our universe. But a color needs multiple bits to store as you note and they are numerical variables that can be projected onto a color space, often represented using three dimensions e.g. RGB, HSV.

    Our retinas and computer screens are two dimensional surfaces but they cannot represent any color at one single point. The retina has different cones sensitive to different colors at different positions on its surface and computer screens typically will have a repeating pattern of different color elements that mix together when viewed from a suitable distance. Similarly, when you mix different colored pigments, at the molecular level there would presumably only be one molecule of any given pigment at the uppermost level at each single point on the surface. Light may pass to lower levels before it is reflected or absorbed, but still, it doesn't seem possible to have any color existing at one single point on a truly two dimensional surface.

    Of course even brightness can't be represented in an instantaneous moment on a single point because time needs to pass to count the number of photons striking each point.

    Please correct me if I've got any of the physics wrong here.

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