Diffractive magic cube network with super-high capacity enabled by mechanical reconfiguration

Abstract Multiplexing and dynamic reconfigurable metasurfaces have been extensively studied to enhance optical system capacity in response to the challenges posed by the exponential growth of optical information. Among them, the mechanically reconfigurable strategy offers a cost-effective and low-complexity approach for capacity enhancement. However, the channel numbers achieved in current studies are insufficient for practical applications because of inadequate mechanical transformations and suboptimal optimization methods. In this article, a diffractive magic cube network (DMCN) is proposed to advance the multiplexing capacity of mechanically reconfigurable metasurfaces. We utilized the deep diffractive neural network (D 2 NN) model to jointly optimize the subset of channels generated by the combination of three mechanical operations, permutation, translation, and rotation. The 144-channel holograms, 108-channel single-focus/multi-focus, and 60-channel orbital angular momentum (OAM) beam/comb generation were numerically achieved and experimentally validated using a spatial light modulator (SLM) and a reflective mirror. Our strategy not only provides a novel paradigm to improve metasurface capacity to super-high level with low crosstalk, but also paves the way for new advancements in optical storage, computing, communication, and photolithography.