Metamaterial Huygens’ Surfaces: Tailoring Wave Fronts with Reflectionless Sheets

Abstract

Huygens' principle is a well-known concept in electromagnetics that dates back to 1690. Here, it is applied to develop designer surfaces that provide extreme control of electromagnetic wave fronts across electrically thin layers. These reflectionless surfaces, referred to as metamaterial Huygens' surfaces, provide new beam shaping, steering, and focusing capabilities. The metamaterial Huygens' surfaces are realized with two-dimensional arrays of polarizable particles that provide both electric and magnetic polarization currents to generate prescribed wave fronts. A straightforward design methodology is demonstrated and applied to develop a beam-refracting surface and a Gaussian-to-Bessel beam transformer. Metamaterial Huygens' surfaces could find a wide range of applications over the entire electromagnetic spectrum including single-surface lenses, polarization controlling devices, stealth technologies, and perfect absorbers.

Metamaterials for Microwave Radomes and the Concept of a Metaradome: Review of the Literature

“…In the design of metasheets capable of influencing in a desired way the propagation of an incident wave, the Huygens principle can be applied [49]. According to the Huygens principle, each point on a wave front may behave International Journal of Antennas and Propagation as a secondary source of spherical waves, and the sum of all secondary waves regulates the travel and the form of the wave [49,50].…”

“…According to the Huygens principle, each point on a wave front may behave International Journal of Antennas and Propagation as a secondary source of spherical waves, and the sum of all secondary waves regulates the travel and the form of the wave [49,50].…”

ENERGY TRANSFER FOR IMPLANTABLE ELECTRONICS IN THE ELECTROMAGNETIC MIDFIELD (Invited Paper)

“…These results show that energy transfer can be made largely insensitive to fine tissue structure, provided that some phaseadjustment mechanism is available at the source. New design methods based on metasurfaces [33,34] may afford more precise ways to shape the electromagnetic midfield using similar flat devices.…”

METASURFACE SYNTHESIS FOR TIME-HARMONIC WAVES: EXACT SPECTRAL AND SPATIAL METHODS (Invited Paper)

“…Complete metasurface design further requires determining the exact shapes of the scattering elements, which is out of the scope of this paper. However, the scattering elements may be directly determined using lookup maps [3], iterative analysis [4], or dipole response approximation [5].…”

“…As two-dimensional metamaterial structures, they do not suffer from the disadvantages associated with volumetric metamaterials, such as bulkiness, excessive losses and fabrication difficulty [1]. Metasurfaces have been employed to control the reflection and transmission of electromagnetic waves [2], realize generalized refraction [3] and reflection-less refraction [4] for plane-waves, single-layer perfect absorbers [6] and reciprocal [7] and non-reciprocal [8,9] polarization rotators.…”