High-efficiency electrically direction-controllable spoof surface plasmon polaritons coupler

Abstract

We propose a design of high-efficiency and direction-controllable spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SSPPs) coupler based on a Pancharatnam–Berry (PB) metasurface and a diode-controlled, linear-to-circular polarization conversion metasurface (PCM). The PB metasurface was designed to achieve high-efficiency excitation of SSPPs by manipulating the phase distribution. The PCM was placed above the PB metasurface at a certain distance, and the propagation direction of SSPPs could be controlled by changing the bias voltage of PCM. To validate the feasibility of the proposed design, a SSPPs coupler was fabricated and assessed. The experimental results were in good agreement with the simulation results. The conversion efficiency from the free space wave to SSPPs was obtained to be as high as 0.76 at 10 GHz, and the propagation direction of SSPPs became controllable under the normal incidence of x-polarized waves on the PCM. Compared to conventional devices such as prism, grating, and gradient-index metasurfaces, the proposed SSPPs coupler is more suitable for SSPPs excitation, thereby providing an interesting route toward developing plasmonic devices.