A Reconfigurable Multifunctional Metasurface for Full‐Space Control of Electromagnetic Waves

Abstract

Metasurfaces have attracted much attention in recent years due to their powerful abilities in manipulating electromagnetic (EM) waves. However, most of the previously reported metasurfaces are incapable of real-time control of full-space EM waves, including transmission, reflection, and absorption at the same time. In this paper, a reconfigurable multifunctional metasurface is proposed that demonstrates real-time control of transmission, absorption, and reflection of EM waves, which can be continuously controlled from total transmission to total reflection, and to perfect absorption. In the case of total reflection, the reflected waves can be further manipulated in a programmable way by changing the digital coding sequences via bias voltages. Meanwhile, the metasurface can independently control vertical and horizontal polarized waves in broadband. The reconfigurable functionalities of the metasurface are validated by experiments, which agree very well with numerical simulations. In addition, a potential application of the reconfigurable multifunctional metasurface in a stealth radome is proposed and demonstrated.

Transmission–Reflection‐Integrated Quadratic Phase Metasurface for Multifunctional Electromagnetic Manipulation in Full Space

“…For example, Cui and co-workers proposed a full-space digitally encoded metasurface consisting of meta-atoms loaded with PIN diodes, which can, respectively, control the transmitted and reflected wavefronts by switching the state of the PIN diodes. [40][41][42] However, the design of active metasurface is more complicated compared with the passive metasurface and requires an extra biasing network which inevitably increases system cost and loss. [43][44][45] Moreover, the previously reported full-space metasurfaces can only achieve EM wave manipulation with a fixed deflection direction and polarization state, without a true full-space beam direction modulation and polarization modulation capability.…”

A Time-Modulated Transparent Nonlinear Active Metasurface for Spatial Frequency Mixing

“…As a type of surface EM component, a metasurface [9][10][11] with artificially designed structures exhibits novel properties for spatial EM wave manipulation, such as multibeam generation [12], beam steering [13], vortex beam generation [14] and so on. Furthermore, the EM response of the metasurface can be electrically adjusted by loading active devices on every unit cell [15][16][17][18], i.e., the smallest atom of a metasurface.…”

Angular‐Encrypted Quad‐Fold Display of Nanoprinting and Meta‐Holography for Optical Information Storage

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to control light waves across the entire spectral range and enable various optical applications and functionalities, including optical cloaking, [9,10] plasmonic coloring, [11] wavefront shaping, [12][13][14][15] meta-lenses, [16,17] meta-holography, [18][19][20][21][22][23] etc.Due to its compact scale and programmable versatility, more recent endeavors on metasurface have demonstrated to make it a competitive candidate for optical information encryption and storage. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] For instance, by encoding the spectral amplitude/phase response, nanoprinting [24,25] /holography [18][19][20][21][22][23] graphs and encryption have been created to exhibit high-resolution displays, which are attainable under microscopes or projected on an optical screen.

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“…to control light waves across the entire spectral range and enable various optical applications and functionalities, including optical cloaking, [9,10] plasmonic coloring, [11] wavefront shaping, [12][13][14][15] meta-lenses, [16,17] meta-holography, [18][19][20][21][22][23] etc.…”