  Spatial light modulators (SLMs) are devices for modulating amplitude, phase
or polarization of a light beam on demand. Such devices have been playing an
indispensable inuence in many areas from our daily entertainments to scientific
researches. In the past decades, the SLMs have been mainly operated in
electrical addressing (EASLM) manner, wherein the writing images are created
and loaded via conventional electronic interfaces. However, adoption of
pixelated electrodes puts limits on both resolution and efficiency of the
EASLMs. Here, we present an optically addressed SLM based on a nonlinear
metasurface (MS-OASLM), by which signal light is directly modulated by another
writing beam requiring no electrode. The MS-OASLM shows unprecedented
compactness and is 400 nm in total thickness benefitting from the outstanding
nonlinearity of the metasurface. And their subwavelength feature size enables a
high resolution up to 250 line pairs per millimeter, which is more than one
order of magnitude better than any currently commercial SLMs. Such MS-OASLMs
could provide opportunities to develop the next generation of high resolution
displays and all-optical information processing technologies.

Optics;Applied Physics