Fig. 1

Schematic illustrations of scalar and vectorial LC-holography. a Scalar LC-holography. Holographic image (a cat) is reconstructed with a random phase distribution (\({\varphi }_{{\text{R}}}\)) when illuminated by LCP light. b Vectorial LC-holography. We spatially multiplexing the LC holograms for LCP and RCP into a single LC layer, which are indicated by blue and red LC directors. Two independent holographic images (a cat without a tail and a cat without a head) are generated with spatially variant amplitudes and phase differences when illuminated by linearly polarized light. These two images are partially overlapped. The vectorial pattern is determined by both the phase difference distribution (\(\Delta \varphi\)) and amplitude ratio (\({A}_{{\text{R}}}/{A}_{{\text{L}}}\)). α is the azimuthal angle distribution of LC directors. c Poincaré sphere together with the polarization ellipse to denote the polarization state by the azimuth angle ψ and the ellipticity angle χ. A nested LC director field with four blue and red LC pixels are depicted. The LC directors within each LC domain are uniformly aligned. a denotes the size of each LC pixel. d Photopatterning of single-material LC superstructures for vectorial LC holography. The insets in dashed boxes 1 and 2 are larger versions of the LC director distribution represented by a pixelated grey-scale pattern and typical digital micro-mirrors in the digital micro-mirror device (DMD) based micro-lithography system, respectively