Kind Of Metasurface Research Articles

Generating superposed terahertz perfect vortices via a spin-multiplexed all-dielectric metasurface

Perfect optical vortices (POVs), characterized as a ring radius independent of topological charge (TC), possess extensive application in particle manipulation and optical communication. At present, the complex and bulky optical device for generating POVs has been miniaturized by leveraging the metasurface, and either spin-dependent or spin-independent POV conversions have been further accomplished. Nevertheless, it is still challenging to generate superposed POVs for incidences with orthogonal circular polarization. Here, a spin-multiplexed all-dielectric metasurface method for generating superposed POVs in the terahertz frequency range is proposed and demonstrated. By using the multiple meta-atom comprised structure as the basic unit, the complex amplitude of two superposed POVs is modulated, decoupled, and subsequently encoded to left- and right-handed circular polarization incidences. Furthermore, two kinds of metasurfaces are fabricated and characterized to validate this controlling method. It is demonstrated that the measured intensity and phase distributions match well with the calculation of the Rayleigh–Sommerfeld diffraction integral, and the radius of superposed POVs is independent of TCs. This work provides promising opportunities for developing ultracompact terahertz functional devices applied to complex structured light generation and terahertz communication, and exploring sophisticated spin angular momentum and orbital angular momentum interactions like the photonic spin-Hall effect.

Metasurface-Assisted Broadband Circularly Polarized Folded Reflectarray Antenna

In this article, a novel design of broadband circularly polarized (CP) folded reflectarray (FRA) antenna is proposed. The CP FRA consists of two kinds of metasurfaces (MSs) and a linearly polarized (LP) open waveguide antenna as the feeding source. The bottom MS functions as the main reflector, which is capable of realizing cross-polarization conversion and beam focusing simultaneously. The upper MS is utilized as a subreflector, which could reflect LP wave coming from the feeding source and transmit its orthogonal counterpart into CP wave. For demonstration, the MS-assisted CP FRA antenna is fabricated and measured. Numerical results are consistent with experimental ones, illustrating a peak gain of 24.1 dBi and a peak aperture efficiency of 51% at 9.9 GHz. The 3 dB gain bandwidth and 3 dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth are achieved as 27.5% (8.8–11.6 GHz) and 43.9% (8–12.5 GHz), respectively. The proposed CP FRA provides a new avenue to realize broadband high-efficiency CP antenna, which may find great potentials in modern wireless communication systems.

Tunable Terahertz Wavefront Modulation Based on Phase Change Materials Embedded in Metasurface.

In the past decades, metasurfaces have shown their extraordinary abilities on manipulating the wavefront of electromagnetic wave. Based on the ability, various kinds of metasurfaces are designed to realize new functional metadevices based on wavefront manipulations, such as anomalous beam steering, focus metalens, vortex beams generator, and holographic imaging. However, most of the previously proposed designs based on metasurfaces are fixed once design, which is limited for applications where light modulation needs to be tunable. In this paper, we proposed a design for THz tunable wavefront manipulation achieved by the combination of plasmonic metasurface and phase change materials (PCMs) in THz region. Here, we designed a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) metasurface with the typical C-shape split ring resonator (CSRR), whose polarization conversion efficiency is nearly 90% for circular polarized light (CPL) in the range of 0.95~1.15 THz when PCM is in the amorphous state, but the conversion efficiency turns to less than 10% in the same frequency range when PCM switches into the crystalline state. Then, benefiting from the high polarization conversion contrast of unit cell, we can achieve tunable wavefront manipulation by utilizing the Pancharatnam–Berry (PB) phase between the amorphous and crystalline states. As a proof-of-concept, the reflective tunable anomalous beam deflector and focusing metalens are designed and characterized, and the results further verify their capability for tunable wavefront manipulation in THz range. It is believed that the design in our work may pave the way toward the tunable wavefront manipulation of THz waves and is potential for dynamic tunable THz devices.

Anisotropic coding metasurfaces and their active manipulation based on vanadium dioxide for multifunctional applications in the terahertz region.

Various kinds of metasurfaces have been proposed because they can be tailored to achieve the desired modulations on electromagnetic wave that do not occur in nature. Compared to conventional metamaterials, coding metasurfaces integrated with information science theory possess numerous distinctive advantages - simple design, time-saving and compatibility with digital devices. Here we propose terahertz multifunctional anisotropic reflective metasurfaces with a metal-insulator-metal cavity structure whose top constructional layer consists of a pair of gold arc-rings and a gold cut-wire located between them. Two different functions of narrow-band absorption and broadband polarization conversion are realized based on different coding matrices using the binary codes '0' and '1'. Furthermore, we integrate a specific coding metasurface with vanadium dioxide (VO2) to realize a temperature-controlled active metasurface. Through the temperature change, dynamic functionalities switching between a narrow-band polarization converter with a polarization conversion ratio over 94% and an efficient low-pass filter are achieved under the phase transition of VO2, and the active metasurface is polarization independent. The proposed coding metasurfaces are verified numerically and experimentally, and have promising applications in terahertz modulation and functional devices.

Exploring near-field sensing efficiency of complementary plasmonic metasurfaces for immunodetection of tumor markers

Plasmonic metasurface biosensors have great potential on label-free high-throughput clinical detection of human tumor markers. In the past decades, nanopillar and nanohole metasurfaces have become the common choices for plasmonic biosensing, because they typically enable universal simple large-area nanopatterns via a low-cost reproducible fabrication manner. The two kinds of metasurfaces have the complementary shapes and are used to be assumed as the same type of two-dimensional plasmonic nanograting for biosensing. Up to date, there is still a lack of comparison study on their biosensing performance, which is critical to guide their better applications on tumor marker detection. In this study, we compare the bulk/surface refractive index and sensitivity of plasmonic nanopillar (PNP) and plasmonic nanohole (PNH) metasurfaces in order to evaluate their biosensing capabilities. The sensing physics about their space near-field utilization is systematically revealed. The PNH metasurface demonstrates a higher biomolecule sensitivity versus the complementary PNP metasurface, and its limit of detection for bovine serum albumin reaches ∼0.078 ng/mL, which implies a greater potential of detecting cancer biomarkers. We further adopt the PNH metasurfaces for immunoassay of three typical tumor markers by testing clinical human serum samples. The results imply that the immunodetection of alpha-fetoprotein has the most optimal sensing efficiency with the lowest detection concentration (<5 IU/mL), which is much lower than its clinical diagnosis threshold of ∼16.5 IU/mL for medical examination. Our work has not only illuminated the distinct biosensing properties of complementary metasurfaces, but also provided a promising way to boost plasmonic biosensing for point-of-care testing.

In-Situ Deposition of Gradiently Distributed and Oxidized Porous Metal Nanoparticles on the Surface of Picosecond Laser-Induced Micro/Nano Structures: A New Kind of Meta-Surface Both Equipped with Super-Hydrophobicity and Anti-Reflectivity

In-Situ Deposition of Gradiently Distributed and Oxidized Porous Metal Nanoparticles on the Surface of Picosecond Laser-Induced Micro/Nano Structures: A New Kind of Meta-Surface Both Equipped with Super-Hydrophobicity and Anti-Reflectivity

Localization and amplification of Rayleigh waves by topological elastic metasurfaces

Recently, the concept of metasurface becomes a hot research topic due to its outstanding advantages compared with its bulk counterpart metamaterial, such as low propagation loss, cheap fabrication cost, compact geometrical structure, high integration level, and specifically excellent performance in wavefront manipulation. Instead of designing elastic metasurfaces for wavefront manipulation based on generalized Snell’s law that have been widely studied, in this paper we focus on the topological performance of one dimensional elastic metasurface for manipulation of Rayleigh waves. We present two methods to design the topological metasurface, and several kinds of metasurfaces will be studied. We will show the existence of topologically protected interface modes in these topological metasurfaces that can realize energy localization around interfaces in the topological metasurface, and the displacement at the interface can be amplified more than two times than the input Rayleigh waves. This research may have important applications in sensitive Rayleigh wave detection, nondestructive testing, energy harvesting of surface waves and other Rayleigh wave related techniques.

A Differential Modulation Scheme for Metasurface-Based Terahertz Communications

Metasurface-based terahertz (THz) modulators, which carry information by changing the spatial pattern of the metasurface at every symbol time, are an important component to establish low-cost low-energy–consuming THz communication systems. This paper proposes a differential spatial THz modulation (DSTM) scheme for metasurface-assisted THz communications. In DSTM, the metasurface pattern activation orders are employed to carry information, instead of the metasurface patterns themselves. In this way, the DSTM receiver can perform differential detection without knowing the metasurface response to incident THz signals and the channel state information. The proposed DSTM scheme is applicable to all kinds of metasurfaces enabling THz communications, including transmissive metasurfaces and reflective metasurfaces. For high-rate DSTM systems, we propose an efficient bits-to-activation-order mapping method and a low-complexity detection method. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme. It is shown that the proposed scheme pays acceptable penalty compared to the non-differential modulation scheme with coherent detection, which needs to know the metasurface response to the incident signals as well as all the channel state information.

Bandwidth Enhancement of Microstrip Patch Antenna Using Metasurface

Abstract In this article, bandwidth enhancement of a microstrip patch antenna using a new kind of metasurface is discussed. This new geometry is used to generate new resonances in antenna and with an optimal position of the metasurface in relation to antenna we can overlap the resonances and obtain a large bandwidth. The proposed antenna showed a bandwidth from 5.1 GHz to 8.0 GHz what can it able to be applied in WiFi 5 and 6. Numerical results were obtained with Ansys HFSS software. A prototype was built and measurements for S11, Smith chart and gain were performed. Numerical and experimental results are in good agreement.

Frequency-Selected Bifunctional Coding Acoustic Metasurfaces

Coding metasurfaces are a kind of metasurface that can combine artificial structures with digital codes ``0'' and ``1.'' By digitally programming the arrangements of structural units, they can manipulate the transmitted or reflected waves into arbitrary patterns. Recently, coding metasurfaces have been demonstrated to realize fascinating functions in acoustics, including far-field modulation, focusing, and vortex beam generation. However, the previous acoustic coding metasurfaces work at a single frequency and have only one function under a specific arrangement, limiting the efficiency and capacity of manipulation to a low quality. To overcome these shortcomings, here we propose frequency-selected bifunctional coding acoustic metasurfaces. Dual-layer Helmholtz-like resonators are utilized to produce a 0 and $\ensuremath{\pi}$ phase difference, corresponding to the ``0'' and ``1'' codes, respectively. Owing to the design of the dual-layer resonators, the two working frequencies are integrated on a single unit with a subwavelength thickness, which eliminates the long-wavelength limitations. Frequency-selected anomalous reflection, diffusion, and Airy-beam generation are further demonstrated to prove its availability. The results are shown through theoretical predictions, simulations, and experiments, which show good correspondence. The proposed frequency-selected bifunctional coding acoustic metasurfaces can be used in acoustic information preservation and provide an alternative way to achieve multispectral acoustic devices.

Fast design of plasmonic metasurfaces enabled by deep learning

Metasurfaces is an emerging field that enables the manipulation of light by an ultra-thin structure composed of sub-wavelength antennae and fulfills an important requirement for miniaturized optical elements. Finding a new design for a metasurface or optimizing an existing design for a desired functionality is a computationally expensive and time consuming process as it is based on an iterative process of trial and error. We propose a deep learning (DL) architecture dubbed bidirectional autoencoder for nanophotonic metasurface design via a template search methodology. In contrast with the earlier approaches based on DL, our methodology addresses optimization in the space of multiple metasurface topologies instead of just one, in order to tackle the one to many mapping problem of inverse design. We demonstrate the creation of a Geometry and Parameter Space Library (GPSL) of metasurface designs with their corresponding optical response using our DL model. This GPSL acts as a universal design and response space for the optimization. As an example application, we use our methodology to design a multi-band gap-plasmon based half-wave plate metasurface. Through this example, we demonstrate the power of our technique in addressing the non-uniqueness problem of common inverse design. Our network converges aptly to multiple metasurface topologies for the desired optical response with a low mean absolute error between desired optical response and the optical response of topologies searched. Our proposed technique would enable fast and accurate design and optimization of various kinds of metasurfaces with different functionalities.

Metasurface-based total internal reflection microscopy

Recent years have seen a tremendous progress in the development of dielectric metasurfaces for visible light applications. Such metasurfaces are ultra-thin optical devices that can manipulate optical wavefronts in an arbitrary manner. Here, we present a newly developed metasurface which allows for coupling light into a microscopy coverslip to achieve total internal reflection (TIR) excitation. TIR fluorescence microscopy (TIRFM) is an important bioimaging technique used specifically to image cellular membranes or surface-localized molecules with high contrast and low background. Its most commonly used modality is objective-type TIRFM where one couples a focused excitation laser beam at the edge of the back focal aperture of an oil-immersion objective with high numerical aperture (N.A.) to realize a high incident-angle plane wave excitation above the critical TIR angle in sample space. However, this requires bulky and expensive objectives with a limited field-of-view (FOV). The metasurface which we describe here represents a low cost and easy-to-use alternative for TIRFM. It consists of periodic 2D arrays of asymmetric structures fabricated in TiO2 on borosilicate glass. It couples up to 70% of the incident non-reflected light into the first diffraction order at an angle of 65° in glass, which is above the critical TIR angle for a glass-water interface. Only ∼7% of the light leaks into propagating modes traversing the glass surface, thus minimizing any spurious background fluorescence originating far outside the glass substrate. We describe in detail design and fabrication of the metasurface, and validate is applicability for TIRFM by imaging immunostained human mesenchymal stem cells over a FOV of 200 µm x 200 µm. We envision that these kinds of metasurfaces can become a valuable tool for low-cost and TIRFM, offering high contrast, low photodamage, and high surface selectivity in fluorescence excitation and detection.

Customized Inverse Design of Metamaterial Absorber Based on Target-Driven Deep Learning Method

Metamaterials (MMs) have already achieved wide applications in academia and industry. The traditional design approach for MMs highly relies on full-wave numerical simulations and trial-and-error methods. It is time-consuming and laborious to obtain the optimal design parameters. Recently, extensive researches have shown advantages and superiority of the deep learning method in solving non-intuitive problem. Several attempts have been made to demonstrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) usage in the electromagnetic field. In this article, a target-driven method empowered by deep learning to realize customized metamaterial absorber (MMA) design has been proposed and demonstrated numerically. Unlike previous deep-learning-based design methods for MMs which directly use the spectrum response to generate the MM’s design parameters, this method takes the frequency domain response of the absorber as the intermediary bridge to establish the mapping between MMAs geometry/material parameters and customized figure-of-merits. The proposed design framework greatly simplified the design process of MMAs, and it can also be generalized to realize automatic inverse design for other kinds of metasurfaces.

Design of Near-Field Focused Metasurface for High-Efficient Wireless Power Transfer With Multifocus Characteristics

This paper presents a new design of near-field focused metasurface for high-efficiency wireless power transfer with multifocus characteristics. A general synthesis procedure is outlined to design metasurfaces with desired multiple foci in the near-field zone. The unit cell of printed tridipole is used to realize the focused metasurface which has a large range of phase shift and is adapted to near-field focusing applications. Different feeding and focusing designs of the printed tridipole metasurfaces are proposed and analyzed. Two kinds of metasurfaces with 20×20 elements are designed, fabricated, and measured at 5.8 GHz. One is the single-feed and single-focus case, and the other is single-feed and two-focus case. Two-dimensional planar near-field scanning technique is implemented to measure the E -field focusing characteristics. Full-wave simulations and experiments demonstrate that the proposed focusing metasurfaces have a high wireless power transfer efficiency of 70%. The relative bandwidth with 50% power focusing efficiency is about 16%. The measured results are in good agreement with the theoretical designs and simulated results, which verify the feasibility and correctness of the proposed approach in this paper.

Launching phase-controlled surface plasmons on Babinet metasurfaces.

Surface plasmons are electromagnetic modes bounded at the metal-dielectric interfaces, which have numerous applications due to the strong field enhancement effect. Therefore, controlling surface plasmons is in high demand for modern photonics and plasmonics. In this Letter, we propose a kind of metasurface for launching surface plasmons with a controlled phase based on the Babinet principle. The phase control is achieved by arranging C-shaped apertures on a metal surface that exhibits highly efficient electric dipole resonance. By properly designing the spatial separation and orientation of the aperture resonators, an arbitrary phase profile is achieved that allows anomalous (directional and focusing/diverging) surface plasmon launching and manipulation of the wavefront.

Metasurfaces and their applications

AbstractMetasurfaces are a topic of significant research and are used in various applications due to their unique ability to manipulate electromagnetic waves in microwave and optical frequencies. These artificial sheet materials, which are usually composed of metallic patches or dielectric etchings in planar or multi-layer configurations with subwavelength thickness, have the advantages of light weight, ease of fabrication, and ability to control wave propagation both on the surface and in the surrounding free space. Recent progress in the field has been classified by application and reviewed in this article. Starting with the development of frequency-selective surfaces and metamaterials, the unique capabilities of different kinds of metasurfaces have been highlighted. Surface impedance can be varied and manipulated by patterning the metasurface unit cells, which has broad applications in surface wave absorbers and surface waveguides. They also enable beam shaping in both transmission and reflection. Another important application is to radiate in a leaky wave mode as an antenna. Other applications of metasurfaces include cloaking, polarizers, and modulators. The controllable surface refractive index provided by metasurfaces can also be applied to lenses. When active and non-linear components are added to traditional metasurfaces, exceptional tunability and switching ability are enabled. Finally, metasurfaces allow applications in new forms of imaging.

A Wideband and Polarization-Independent Metasurface Based on Phase Optimization for Monostatic and Bistatic Radar Cross Section Reduction

A broadband and polarization-independent metasurface is analyzed and designed for both monostatic and bistatic radar cross section (RCS) reduction in this paper. Metasurfaces are composed of two types of electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) lattice, which is a subarray with “0” or “π” phase responses, arranged in periodic and aperiodic fashions. A new mechanism is proposed for manipulating electromagnetic (EM) scattering and realizing the best reduction of monostatic and bistatic RCS by redirecting EM energy to more directions through controlling the wavefront of EM wave reflected from the metasurface. Scattering characteristics of two kinds of metasurfaces, periodic arrangement and optimized phase layout, are studied in detail. Optimizing phase layout through particle swarm optimization (PSO) together with far field pattern prediction can produce a lot of scattering lobes, leading to a great reduction of bistatic RCS. For the designed metasurface based on optimal phase layout, a bandwidth of more than 80% is achieved at the normal incidence for the −9.5 dB RCS reduction for both monostatic and bistatic. Bistatic RCS reduction at frequency points with exactly 180° phase difference reaches 17.6 dB. Both TE and TM polarizations for oblique incidence are considered. The measured results are in good agreement with the corresponding simulations.