Static metasurfaces have shown to be prominent compact structures for reciprocal and frequency-invariant transformation of electromagnetic waves in space. However, incorporating temporal variation to static metasurfaces would result in dynamic apparatuses which are capable of four-dimensional tailoring of both the spatial and temporal characteristics of electromagnetic waves, leading to functionalities that are far beyond the capabilities of conventional static metasurfaces. This includes nonreciprocal full-duplex wave transmission, pure frequency conversion, parametric wave amplification, spatiotemporal decomposition, and space-time wave diffraction. This paper reviews recent progress and opportunities offered by space-time metasurfaces to break reciprocity, revealing their potential for low-energy, compact, integrated non-reciprocal devices and sub-systems, and discusses the future of this exciting research front.
Huygens' metasurfaces have demonstrated a remarkable potential to perform wave transformations within a subwavelength region. In particular, omega-bianisotropic Huygens' metasurfaces have allowed for the passive implementation of any wave transformation that conserves real power locally. Previous reports have also shown that Huygens' metasurface pairs are capable of realizing transformations that break the local power conservation requirement by redistributing the total power, while the wave propagates between the two metasurfaces. However, the required separation distance overshadows the low-…
Huygens' metasurfaces have demonstrated the ability to tailor electromagnetic wavefronts with passive low-profile structures. The fundamental constraint enabling passive and ideally lossless solutions is the conservation of the normal real power locally along the metasurface. In this work, we examine the use of auxiliary surface waves to overcome this limitation and design Huygens' metasurfaces for wave transformations with different incident and output power density profiles. The developed method relies on the optimization of a surface-wave distribution that is utilized to redistribute the po…
We present methods for analyzing and designing cylindrical electromagnetic metasurfaces with non-circular cross sections based on conformal transformations. It can be difficult to treat surfaces with non-canonical geometries since they generally do not admit straightforward solutions to the Helmholtz wave equation subject to the appropriate boundary conditions. This leads to the reliance on full wave numerical techniques which are only suitable for the analysis, but not the synthesis, of these surfaces. We address this issue by employing conformal transformations to map the physical space into…
The bianisotropic susceptibility Generalized Sheet Transition Conditions (GSTCs) synthesis method is extended from planar to spherical metasurfaces. Properties specific to the non-zero intrinsic curvature of the spherical shape are highlighted and different types of corresponding transformations are described. Finally, the susceptibility-GSTC method and exotic properties of spherical metasurfaces are validated and illustrated with three examples: illusion transformation, ring focusing and birefringence.
Recent advances in metasurfaces have shown the importance of controlling the bianisotropic response of the constituent meta-atoms for maximum efficiency wavefront transformation. Under the paradigm of a bianisotropic metasurface, full control of the local scattering properties is allowed opening new design avenues for creating reciprocal metasurfaces. Despite recent advances in the perfect transformation of both electromagnetic and acoustic plane waves, the importance of bianisotropic metasurfaces for transforming cylindrical waves is still unexplored. Motivated by the possibility of arbitrari…
To enhance transmission efficiency of Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) phase metasurfaces, multilayer split-ring resonators were proposed to develop encoding sequences. As per the generalized Snell law, the deflection angle of the PB phase encoding metasurfaces depends on the metasurface period size. Therefore, it is impossible to design an infinitesimal metasurface unit.Consequently, the continuous transmission scattering angle cannot be obtained. In digital signal processing, this study introduces the Fourier convolution principle on encoding metasurface sequences to freely control the transmitted sc…
We present the end-to-end design of compact passive and lossless metasurface (MTS) antennas with integrated feeds. The complete low-profile system consists of a single-layered reactive impedance MTS printed on top of a grounded dielectric substrate, and is fed by sources which are embedded inside the substrate. An accurate and efficient volume-surface integral equation-based model of the device is developed, and used as the basis for the rapid optimization of its performance. The optimized designs leverage tailored auxiliary surface waves supported by the impedance MTS to distribute the locali…
Electromagnetic metasurfaces offer the capability to realize almost arbitrary power conserving field transformations. These field transformations are governed by the generalized sheet transition conditions, which relate the tangential fields on each side of the surface through the surface parameters. Ideally, engineers would like to determine the surface parameters for transformations based on their application-specific far-field criteria. However, determining the surface parameters to satisfy these criteria is challenging without direct knowledge of the tangential fields on one side of the su…
A finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation of broadband electromagnetic metasurfaces based on direct in- corporation of Generalized Sheet Transition Conditions (GSTCs) inside a conventional Yee-cell region has been proposed, for arbitrary wave excitations. This is achieved by inserting a zero thickness metasurface inside bulk nodes of the Yee-cell region, giving rise to three distinct cell configurations - Symmetric Cell (SC), Asymmetric Cell (AC) and Tight Asymmetric Cell (TAC). In addition, the metasurface is modelled using electric and magnetic surface susceptibilities exhibiting a b…
Self-complementary metasurfaces have gained significant attention due to their unique frequency-independent transmission and reflection properties and the possibility of the polarization transformation of plane waves. In this paper, we focus on the near-field spectrum to investigate both theoretically and experimentally the properties of surface waves supported by anisotropic self-complementary metasurfaces. We show that as a consequence of the electromagnetic Babinet's duality, such structure is hyperbolic for any frequency. We reveal the polarization degree of freedom inherent to plane waves…
A spectral splitting, light trapping dielectric metasurface is designed, fabricated and integrated into a four-terminal perovskite/silicon hybrid tandem solar cell to increase the absorption of light close to the bandgap of the perovskite top cell, and enhance transmission of the near-infrared spectral band towards the bottom cell. The metagrating is composed of a hexagonal array of unit cells of 150-nm-tall hydrogenated amorphous silicon trimer nanostructures with dielectric Mie resonances in the 600-800 nm perovskite near-gap region, made using substrate-conformal imprint lithography. By tai…
In the quest to realize analog signal processing using sub-wavelength metasurfaces, in this paper, we demonstrate the first experimental demonstration of programmable time-modulated metasurface processors based on the key properties of spatial Fourier transformation. Exploiting space-time coding strategy enables local, independent, and real-time engineering of not only amplitude but also phase profile of the contributing reflective digital meta-atoms at both central and harmonic frequencies. Several illustrative examples are demonstrated to show that the proposed multifunctional calculus metas…
Although a rigorous theoretical ground on metasurfaces has been established in the recent years on the basis of the equivalence principle, the majority of metasurfaces for converting a propagating wave into a surface wave are developed in accordance with the so-called generalized Snell's law being a simple heuristic rule for performing wave transformations. Recently, for the first time, Tcvetkova et al. [Phys. Rev. B 97, 115447 (2018)] have rigorously studied this problem by means of a reflecting anisotropic metasurface, which is, unfortunately, difficult to realize, and no experimental result…
Monitoring and controlling the state of polarization of electromagnetic waves is of significant interest for various basic and practical applications such as linear position sensing and medical imaging. Here, we propose the first conformal digital metamaterial absorber to detect the polarization state of THz incident waves. The proposed polarimeter is capable of characterizing four independent polarization states of (TE, TM, $\pm {45^\circ}$ linear, and RCP/LCP) by observing the reflectivity of the structure with respect to the x- and y-direction. Besides, the proposed structure displays a str…
In this study, we numerically demonstrate how the response of recently reported circuit-based metasurfaces is characterized by their circuit parameters. These metasurfaces, which include a set of four diodes as a full wave rectifier, are capable of sensing different waves even at the same frequency in response to the incident waveform, or more specifically the pulse width. This study reveals the relationship between the electromagnetic response of such waveform-selective metasurfaces and the SPICE parameters of the diodes used. First, we show that reducing a parasitic capacitive component of t…
Spoof surface plasmon meta-couplers are compact antennas which link propagating waves and surface waves. However, most of them are designed with a fixed phase gradient and channel for the incident waves with specific polarization, which limits their further applications in multichannel scenarios. In this Letter, we propose, to the best of our knowledge, a new method that combines the Brillouin folds theory with the Generalized Snell Law. We demonstrate that when the phase gradient of the metasurface is large enough, Brillouin folds effect will occur, which will create dual phase gradient space…
Programmable metasurfaces have garnered significant attention as they confer unprecedented control over the electromagnetic response of any surface. Such feature has given rise to novel design paradigms such as Software-Defined Metamaterials (SDM) and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) with multiple groundbreaking applications. However, the development of programmable metasurfaces tailored to the particularities of a potentially broad application pool becomes a daunting task because the design space becomes remarkably large. This paper aims to ease the design process by proposing a meth…
Over the last couple of years, the digital coding acoustic metasurfaces have been developed rapidly as a highly active research area for their unique and flexible manipulation of acoustic wavefronts. Nevertheless, all recent attentions in the acoustic community have been mainly concentrated on space-encoded architectures, leaving the room free for benefiting from the unique features of spatiotemporally modulated metasurfaces. By entering the world of time, here, we propose a space-time-coding acoustic digital metasurface with exotic ability to dynamically transfer the energy of the carrier aco…
A systematic numerical framework based on Integral Equations and Generalized Sheet Transition Conditions (IE-GSTCs) is presented in 2D to synthesize closed metasurface holograms and skins for creating electromagnetic illusions of specified objects and as a special case, to camouflaging them against their backgrounds. The versatile hologram surface is modeled using a zero-thickness sheet model of a generalized metasurface expressed in terms of its surface susceptibilities, which is further integrated into the GSTCs and the IE current-field propagation operators. To estimate the effectiveness of…
In this paper, a wideband and low-scattering metasurface in terahertz (THz) is introduced. The proposed coding metasurface is composed of four different graphene square patches in one layer, which has a distinct bias voltage. By optimizing the chemical potential of each patch, the reflection phase and amplitude of a designed element can be controlled in a real-time manner. The chemical potential optimizing approach is a promising method to develop metasurfaces, which can tune the reflection phase, magnitude, or polarization dynamically at different frequencies spectrum. Indeed, by adjusting th…
