Design of digital coding metasurfaces with independent controls of phase and amplitude responses

Abstract

Digital coding metasurfaces have attracted attention due to their advantages compared to metamaterials. Many devices have been proposed by encoding the phase responses on metasurfaces such as orbit angular momentum generation, prefect absorbers, and holography. For complete manipulation for propagation of electromagnetic waves, it would be beneficial to control both phase and amplitude responses. Here, we propose a metasurface with independent control of phase and amplitude profiles, which is composed of four unit cells, and the amplitude responses of all unit cells range from 0.3 to 0.7. The four units have phase responses of 0, π/2, π, and 3π/2 separately to mimic the “00,” “01,” “10,” and “11” digital elements. The direction of the reflected beam from the metasurface can be manipulated by different sequences of digital elements, and meanwhile, the intensity of the reflected beam can be modulated through changing different amplitude responses in the same direction. We show that the distributions of both phase and amplitude responses of the metasurface will contribute to scattering reduction. We have used indium tin oxide to design the patterns of four units. The experiments and simulations confirm the physical phenomena mentioned above. The separate control of phase and amplitude responses suggests potential applications in high quality holography and mathematical operations of metasurfaces.