In this study we elaborate on the recent concept of metagratings proposed in Ra'di et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 067404 (2017)] for efficient manipulation of reflected waves. Basically, a metagrating is a set of 1D arrays of polarization line currents which are engineered to cancel scattering in undesirable diffraction orders. We consider a general case of metagratings composed of N polarization electric line currents per supercell. This generalization is a necessary step to totally control diffraction patterns. We show that a metagrating having N equal to the number of plane waves scattered in the far-field can be used for controlling the diffraction pattern. To validate the developed theoretical approach, anomalous and multichannel reflections are demonstrated with 3D full-wave simulations in the microwave regime at 10 GHz. The results can be interesting for the metamaterials community as allow one to significantly decrease the number of used elements and simplify the design of wavefront manipulation devices, what is very convenient for optical and infra-red frequency ranges. Our findings also may serve as a way for development of efficient tunable antennas in the microwave domain.

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Originally introduced in the early 2010's, the idea of smart environments through reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) controlling the reflections of the electromagnetic waves has attracted much attention in recent years in preparation for the future 6G. Since reconfigurable intelligent surfaces are not based on increasing the number of sources, they could indeed pave the way to greener and potentially limitless wireless communications. In this paper, we design, model and demonstrate experimentally a millimeter wave reconfigurable intelligent surface based on an electronically tunable metasurface with binary phase modulation. We first study numerically the unit cell of the metasurface, based on a PIN diode, and obtain a good phase shift and return loss for both polarizations, over a wide frequency range around 28.5 GHz. We then fabricate and characterize the unit cell and verify its properties, before fabricating the whole 10 cm×10 cm reconfigurable intelligent surface. We propose an analytical description of the use that can be done of the binary phase RIS, both in the near field (reflectarray configuration) and in the far field (access point extender). We finally verify experimentally that the designed RIS works as expected, performing laboratory experiments of millimeter wave beamforming both in the near field and far field configuration. Our experimental results demonstrate the high efficiency of our binary phase RIS to control millimeter waves in any kind of scenario and this at the sole cost of the energy dissipated by the PIN diodes used in our design.