Fig. 1: Schematic illustration of the discontinuous OAM metasurface holography.

a, b Comparison between conventional constant OAM holography and our proposed discontinuous OAM holography. a For conventional OAM holography, the TC remains constant with azimuth. When the incident light is rotated, the output image remains unchanged. b For discontinuous OAM holography, the TC is azimuthally encoded to vary with the angular position, enabling dynamic image switching by rotating the incident beam. c The discontinuous OAM phase (top row) and the resultant electric field distribution (bottom row) of multiplexing Mode 1. d The discontinuous OAM phase (top row) and the resultant electric field distribution (bottom row) of multiplexing Mode 2. The first column of (c, d) shows the original discontinuous OAM. The second column of (c, d) shows the new OAM phase that is rotated anticlockwise by 180° and 90°, respectively. The red dashed boxes in (d) show the overlap regions with unchanged TC distribution after rotation. e The calculated orthogonality of the two discontinuous OAM modes. Mode 1 shows complete orthogonality. Mode 2 shows partial orthogonality due to the partial overlap of the TCs.