Terahertz wavefront engineering using a hard-coded metasurface

Abstract

During the past few years, coding metamaterials (MM) drew significant attention, where the far-field scattering/transmission pattern of the electromagnetic wave (particularly in the THz regime) can be encoded into a single or few-bit digitized phase-response of the metasurface, thereby enabling a full digital control. Single-bit MMs contain two types of unit cells where the phase becomes 0 and 1 (in units of ?), respectively. By arranging these unit cells into a 2D surface pattern, the THz wavefront can be shaped. In this work, a novel hard-coded metasurface was designed, fabricated, and experimentally investigated for multi-beam reflection of incident THz beam. The design employs stripe and checkerboard patterns of bilayer MM unit cells consisting of square gold patches with a polymer spacing layer from a gold backplane. Experimental and simulation results show that the incident wave in the 0.500–0.750 THz range can be reflected with > 95% efficiency in uniform amplitude and 1-bit coded phase. For the checkerboard metasurface pattern, the measured and analytically calculated reflection angle shows good agreement. The metasurface design is suitable for large-scale fabrication and can potentially be used as a template in the development of actively coded metasurfaces. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.