Emulating bianisotropic coupling through coherent illumination

Abstract

One of the main advantages of reciprocal bianisotropic metasurfaces is their capability to produce asymmetric scattering depending from which side they are illuminated and on the handedness of circularly polarized illuminations. For most applications, these metasurfaces are designed for illumination by a single source at a time. The resulting bianisotropic metasurface has a specific and usually complex geometrical structure that ensures the expected scattering produced under various illuminations. Here we show that geometrical asymmetry of metasurfaces can be emulated by using non-bianisotropic layers in presence of coherent illumination, which allows us to replicate and optically control the desired asymmetric scattering and chirality effects. In particular, the concept is developed on an example of emulating asymmetric scattering needed to create a 180$^\circ$ hybrid junction for plane waves. We show that this device can be realized either using a bianisotropic metasurface or a set of simple sheets with electric response under simultaneous illumination by two coherent waves.