Flat­Knit, Flexible, Textile Metasurfaces.

Lightweight, low-cost metasurfaces and reflectarrays that are easy to stow and deploy are desirable for many terrestrial and space-based communications and sensing applications. This work demonstrates a lightweight, flexible metasurface platform based on flat-knit textiles operating in the cm-wave spectral range. By using a colorwork knitting approach called float-jacquard knitting to directly integrate an array of resonant metallic antennas into a textile, two textile reflectarray devices, a metasurface lens (metalens), and a vortex-beam generator are realized. Operating as a receiving antenna, the metalens focuses a collimated normal-incidence beam to a diffraction-limited, off-broadside focal spot. Operating as a transmitting antenna, the metalens converts the divergent emission from a horn antenna into a collimated beam with peak measured directivity, gain, and efficiency of 21.30, 15.30, and -6.00 dB (25.12%), respectively. The vortex-beam generating metasurface produces a focused vortex beam with a topological charge of m = 1 over a wide frequency range of 4.1-5.8 GHz. Strong specular reflection is observed for the textile reflectarrays, caused by wavy yarn floats on the backside of the float-jacquard textiles. This work demonstrates a novel approach for the scalable production of flexible metasurfaces by leveraging commercially available yarns and well-established knitting machinery and techniques.

Metasurfaces for next-generation wireless communication systems.

Tailored time variations, nonlinearities and active elements can endow metasurfaces with unique opportunities for next-generation wireless communication systems, enriching the growing platform of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces.

Stability bounds on superluminal propagation in active structures.

Active materials have been explored in recent years to demonstrate superluminal group velocities over relatively broad bandwidths, implying a potential path towards bold claims such as information transport beyond the speed of light, as well as antennas and metamaterial cloaks operating over very broad bandwidths. However, causality requires that no portion of an impinging pulse can pass its precursor, implying a fundamental trade-off between bandwidth, velocity and propagation distance. Here, we clarify the general nature of superluminal propagation in active structures and derive a bound on these quantities fundamentally rooted into stability considerations. By applying filter theory, we show that this bound is generally applicable to causal structures of arbitrary complexity, as it applies to each zero-pole pair describing their response. As the system complexity grows, we find that only minor improvements in superluminal bandwidth can be practically achieved. Our results provide physical insights into the limitations of superluminal structures based on active media, implying severe constraints in several recently proposed applications.

Radio-transparent dipole antenna based on a metasurface cloak.

Antenna technology is at the basis of ubiquitous wireless communication systems and sensors. Radiation is typically sustained by conduction currents flowing around resonant metallic objects that are optimized to enhance efficiency and bandwidth. However, resonant conductors are prone to large scattering of impinging waves, leading to challenges in crowded antenna environments due to blockage and distortion. Metasurface cloaks have been explored in the quest of addressing this challenge by reducing antenna scattering. However, metasurface-based designs have so far shown limited performance in terms of bandwidth, footprint and overall scattering reduction. Here we introduce a different route towards radio-transparent antennas, in which the cloak itself acts as the radiating element, drastically reducing the overall footprint while enhancing scattering suppression and bandwidth, without sacrificing other relevant radiation metrics compared to conventional antennas. This technique opens opportunities for cloaking technology, with promising features for crowded wireless communication platforms and noninvasive sensing.

Erratum to "Microwave Tunneling and Robust Information Transfer Based on Parity-Time-Symmetric Absorber-Emitter Pairs".

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.34133/2019/7108494.].

Combined Metagratings for Efficient Broad-Angle Scattering Metasurface.

Spectrally controlled diffusion and reflection of light are key operations for light management in many optical devices. Integration of this operation in complex nanophotonic devices requires a 2D interface that provides tailored spectrum and directivity control. Here, we present a metagrating superstructure that realizes a resonant light reflector with tailored angular scattering profile. Millimeter-sized metasurfaces are built from arrays of combined supercells of 20-50 µm, composed of 5-7 differently pitched metagratings that tailor at will and with large efficiency the angular response. Each supercell is composed of one or more Si Mie resonators, arranged in a periodic array above an Ag back plane and tailored to resonantly scatter light at 650 nm into only the ±1 diffraction orders with very high efficiency. By varying the pitch and supercell design, we can tailor the overall metasurface reflection profile with large flexibility, realizing a broad-angle Lambertian-type scattering metasurface, as well as a large-angle (35-75°) scattering metasurface, both with resonant optical scattering efficiencies above 70%. These ultrathin structures, fabricated using thin-film deposition, electron beam lithography, and reactive ion etching, can find applications for light trapping and spectrum splitting in solar cells and other devices.

Microwave Tunneling and Robust Information Transfer Based on Parity-Time-Symmetric Absorber-Emitter Pairs.

Robust signal transfer in the form of electromagnetic waves is of fundamental importance in modern technology, yet its operation is often challenged by unwanted modifications of the channel connecting transmitter and receiver. Parity-time- (PT-) symmetric systems, combining active and passive elements in a balanced form, provide an interesting route in this context. Here, we demonstrate a PT-symmetric microwave system operating in the extreme case in which the channel is shorted through a small reactance, which acts as a nearly impenetrable obstacle, and it is therefore expected to induce large reflections and poor transmission. After placing a gain element behind the obstacle, and a balanced lossy element in front of it, we observe full restoration of information and overall transparency to an external observer, despite the presence of the obstacle. Our theory, simulations, and experiments unambiguously demonstrate stable and robust wave tunneling and information transfer supported by PT symmetry, opening opportunities for efficient communication through channels with dynamic changes, active filtering, and active metamaterial technology.

Maximum Willis Coupling in Acoustic Scatterers.

Willis coupling in acoustic materials defines the cross-coupling between strain and velocity, analogous to bianisotropic phenomena in electromagnetics. While these phenomena have been garnering significant attention in recent years, to date their effects have been considered mostly perturbative. Here, we derive general bounds on the Willis response of acoustic scatterers, show that these bounds can be reached in suitably designed scatterers, and outline a systematic venue for the realistic implementation of maximally bianisotropic acoustic inclusions. We then employ these inclusions to realize acoustic metasurfaces for bending and steering of sound with unitary efficiency.

Metagratings: Beyond the Limits of Graded Metasurfaces for Wave Front Control.

Graded metasurfaces exploit the local momentum imparted by an impedance gradient to mold the impinging wave front. This approach suffers from fundamental limits on the overall conversion efficiency, and it is challenged by fabrication limitations on the spatial resolution. Here, we introduce the concept of metagratings, formed by periodic arrays of carefully tailored bianisotropic inclusions and show that they enable wave front engineering with unitary efficiency and significantly lower fabrication demands. We employ this concept to design reflective metasurfaces for wave front steering without limitations on efficiency. A similar approach can be extended to transmitted beams and arbitrary wave front transformation, opening opportunities for highly efficient metasurfaces for extreme wave manipulation.