Abstract
Optical metasurfaces have catalysed transformative advances across imaging, optoelectronics, quantum information processing, sensing, energy conversion, and optical computing. Yet, most current research remains constrained by the challenge of integrating multiple functions within a single device. Inspired by the aesthetic of disordered mosaics in art, we demonstrate that by engineering structural disorder of meta-pixels to implement a photonic function, the active area required can be considerably reduced, without compromising optical performance. Without increasing the design complexity, the remaining unallocated space can be repurposed to encode functionally distinct meta-pixels, each independently addressable via various optical degrees of freedom. To demonstrate the universal adaptability of our approach, we present two proof-of-concept examples including an achromatic metalens — that operates across the 1200–1400 nm spectral window and with a scalable aperture size up to 8.1 mm — and single-shot, high-spatial-resolution polarimetric imaging of arbitrarily structured light fields. This disordered mosaic metasurface platform establishes a versatile foundation for integrating diverse photonic functionalities within a single diffractive optical element, representing a substantial step toward compact, high-density, multifunctional optical devices.
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The data supporting the findings in this study are available in the paper and Supplementary Information. Source data are provided with this paper. The data used in this study are available in the GitHub database under accession code https://github.com/Chi0000000001/raw_data_mosaic_work. Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgements
This work was performed in part at the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN) in the Victorian Node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF). The authors acknowledge the following funding support. H.R.: Australian Research Council grant (DE220101085, DP220102152, FT250100565); S.A.M.: Australian Research Council grant (DP220102152, DP250102064), Lee Lucas Chair in Physics; A.F.: Thanks to the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the CSIR/NRF Rental Pool Programme, and the South African Quantum Technology Initiative. In the end, the authors thank Ondřej Červinka for the assistance with the polarimetric imaging experiment and Jingqi Liu for help with the schematic drawings.
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H.R., C.Liu and C. Li conceived the project. C.Liu modelled the disorder and function density part in Fig. 2. C.Li and H.R. modelled achromatic and polarimetric metasurfaces for Figs. 3–5. C.Li fabricated all the metasurface samples. C.Li, H.R. and H.Y. designed and performed the experiments for achromatic metalens and polarimetric metasurfaces. C.P. and A.F. characterised vector fields, Skyrmion samples and plotted related data. C.Li. and C.Liu processed the data and plotted the figures. C.Li, C.Liu and H.R. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. A.F., S.A.M., contributed to discussion of the results. H.R. supervised the project.
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Li, C., Liu, C., Peters, C. et al. Disordered mosaic metasurfaces with scalable functional density. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71774-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71774-5
