A programmable metasurface with dynamic polarization, scattering and focusing control

By Huanhuan Yang, Xiangyu Cao, Fan Yang, Jun Gao, Shenheng Xu, Maokun Li, Xibi Chen, Yi Zhao, Yuejun Zheng, Sijia Li. Scientific Reports, 2016

610 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Diverse electromagnetic (EM) responses of a programmable metasurface with a relatively large scale have been investigated, where multiple functionalities are obtained on the same surface. The unit cell in the metasurface is integrated with one PIN diode, and thus a binary coded phase is realized for a single polarization. Exploiting this anisotropic characteristic, reconfigurable polarization conversion is presented first. Then the dynamic scattering performance for two kinds of sources, i.e. a plane wave and a point source, is carefully elaborated. To tailor the scattering properties, genetic algorithm, normally based on binary coding, is coupled with the scattering pattern analysis to optimize the coding matrix. Besides, inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) technique is also introduced to expedite the optimization process of a large metasurface. Since the coding control of each unit cell allows a local and direct modulation of EM wave, various EM phenomena including anomalous reflection, diffusion, beam steering and beam forming are successfully demonstrated by both simulations and experiments. It is worthwhile to point out that a real-time switch among these functionalities is also achieved by using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). All the results suggest that the proposed programmable metasurface has great potentials for future applications.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e635f406e0cf4461b5c5a39601929faa0186fb58

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Citations in the corpus

Dynamically controlling terahertz wavefronts with cascaded metasurfaces (2021, positive): “29 – 33 However, while active elements in deep-subwave-length sizes are easily found in the microwave regime (e.g., PIN diodes and varactors), which have been successfully used to construct active metadevices for beam-steering, 34 – 36 programmable holograms, 37,38 and dynamic imaging, 39,40 they…”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface Meets OFDM: Protocol Design and Rate Maximization (2019, background): “Speciﬁcally, note that since the IRS elements are usually tightly packed [15], the channels for adjacent elements are practically correlated .”
Capacity Characterization for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided MIMO Communication (2019, methodology): “We assume that each element of the IRS is able to re-scatter the signal at the IRS independently (without cross-interference) by an individual reflection coefficient, which can be dynamically adjusted by the IRS controller for desired signal reflection [38], [39].”
A Survey on Green 6G Network: Architecture and Technologies (2019, background): “Metamaterial and metasurface can be deployed in a radio-controllable wireless environment [76].”
A New Wireless Communication Paradigm through Software-Controlled Metasurfaces (2018, methodology): “Since deriving the tile behavior via analysis is challenging in all but static meta-atom cases, an approach based on learning heuristics can also be employed instead [5].”
Metantenna: When Metasurface Meets Antenna Again (2020, methodology): “The radiation pattern of the antenna can also be dynamically reconfigured with the help of metasurfaces [50], [154]–[156].”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Energy Efficiency in Wireless Communication (2018, background): “The RIS units operating on the incoming ﬁeld can be distributed over the meta-surface with continuity [14], [19], [20], [29] or in discrete positions [15], [22], [23], [30].”