New research from the University of St Andrews is paving the way for holographic technology, according to researchers, and has the potential to transform smart devices, communication, gaming and entertainment.

Researchers from St Andrew’s School of Physics and Astronomy have created a new optoelectronic device from the combined use of Holographic Metasurfaces and Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs), promising a simpler, cheaper approach to the use of holograms, overcoming the main barriers to the technology being used more widely.

OLEDs are thin film devices widely used to make the coloured pixels in mobile phone displays and some TVs, as well as in emerging applications like biophotonics and sensing, where the ability to integrate with other technologies makes them good candidates to realise miniaturised light-based platforms.

A holographic metasurfaces, on the other hand, is a thin, flat array of tiny structures called meta-atoms, roughly a thousandth of the width of a strand of hair, designed to manipulate light’s properties. 

These are used to make holograms and are found across fields like data storage, anti-counterfeiting, optical displays, and sensing.

While neither technology is new, this marks the first time both have been used together to produce the basic building block of a holographic display, a combination which could make holographic technology more compact in future. 

“OLED displays normally need thousands of pixels to create a simple picture,” said Professor Graham Turnbull. “This new approach allows a complete image to be projected from a single OLED pixel.”

Until now, researchers could only make very simple shapes with OLEDs, which limited their usability, but the research from St Andrews provides a path toward a miniaturised and highly integrated metasurface display.

Researchers found that when each meta-atom is carefully shaped to control the properties of the beam of light that goes through it, it behaves as a pixel of the holographic metasurface. When light goes through at each pixel, the properties of the light are slightly modified.

Thanks to these modifications, the study found it is possible to create a pre-designed image on the other side, exploiting the principle of light interference, where light waves create complicated patterns when they interact with each other.

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“Holographic metasurfaces are one of the most versatile material platforms to control light,” said Andrea Di Falco, professor in nano-photonics at St Andrews.

“With this work, we have removed one of the technological barriers that prevent the adoption of metamaterials in everyday applications. 

“This breakthrough will enable a step change in the architecture of holographic displays for emerging applications, for example, in virtual and augmented reality.”