A metasurface-based light-to-microwave transmitter for hybrid wireless communications

Abstract

Signal conversion plays an important role in many applications such as communication, sensing, and imaging. Realizing signal conversion between optical and microwave frequencies is a crucial step to construct hybrid communication systems that combine both optical and microwave wireless technologies to achieve better features, which are highly desirable in the future wireless communications. However, such a signal conversion process typically requires a complicated relay to perform multiple operations, which will consume additional hardware/time/energy resources. Here, we report a light-to-microwave transmitter based on the time-varying and programmable metasurface integrated with a high-speed photoelectric detection circuit into a hybrid. Such a transmitter can convert a light intensity signal to two microwave binary frequency shift keying signals by using the dispersion characteristics of the metasurface to implement the frequency division multiplexing. To illustrate the metasurface-based transmitter, a hybrid wireless communication system that allows dual-channel data transmissions in a light-to-microwave link is demonstrated, and the experimental results show that two different videos can be transmitted and received simultaneously and independently. Our metasurface-enabled signal conversion solution may enrich the functionalities of metasurfaces, and could also stimulate new information-oriented applications.

Applications of Metamaterials and Metasurfaces

“…Metasurfaces can be utilized to control the EM waves within one thin layer, leading to substantial advantages, such as low cost, and high degree of integration. They can be used in a wide spectrum of applications such as perfect lens [11], perfect absorbing [12], invisibility [13], light bending [14], and polarization conversion [15], to name but a few.…”

Computational spectropolarimetry with a tunable liquid crystal metasurface

“…The measurement of multi-dimensional light field information can find its application in various fields. For instance, polarization measurements can reveal the material composition [1,2] and surface textures [3] of objects, whereas spectral analysis can be instrumental for chemical study [4] and wavelength-division-based telecommunication [5].…”

A Polarization‐Modulated Information Metasurface for Encryption Wireless Communications

“…In recent years, digitally programmable metasurfaces have been rapidly developed, [ 41 ] which make a bridge between the physical world and information science, and have shown great advantages in digital wireless communication applications since the architecture of the conventional radio‐frequency (RF) transmitters can be greatly simplified by adopting this new technology. [ 42 , 43 , 44 , 45 , 46 ] However, to the best of our knowledge, the abovementioned studies are limited to unprotected direct information transmission, and the research about information encryption technology based on this new‐type wireless communication is still very limited.…”