TY - JOUR
T1 - An Ultrathin, Fast-Response, Large-Scale Liquid-Crystal-Facilitated Multi-Functional Reconfigurable Metasurface for Comprehensive Wavefront Modulation
AU - Wu, Xin Yu
AU - Feng, Hong Yuan
AU - Wan, Fengshuo
AU - Wei, Meng
AU - Guo, Chong
AU - Cai, Longzhu
AU - Wu, Fan
AU - Jiang, Zhi Hao
AU - Kang, Lei
AU - Hong, Wei
AU - Werner, Douglas H.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 Wiley-VCH GmbH.
PY - 2024/6/26
Y1 - 2024/6/26
N2 - The rapid advancement of prevailing communication/sensing technologies necessitates cost-effective millimeter-wave arrays equipped with a massive number of phase-shifting cells to perform complicated beamforming tasks. Conventional approaches employing semiconductor switch/varactor components or tunable materials encounter obstacles such as quantization loss, high cost, high complexity, and limited adaptability for realizing large-scale arrays. Here, a low-cost, ultrathin, fast-response, and large-scale solution relying on metasurface concepts combined together with liquid crystal (LC) materials requiring a layer thickness of only 5 µm is reported. Rather than immersing resonant structures in LCs, a joint material-circuit-based strategy is devised, via integrating deep-subwavelength-thick LCs into slow-wave structures, to achieve constitutive metacells with continuous phase shifting and stable reflectivity. An LC-facilitated reconfigurable metasurface sub-system containing more than 2300 metacells is realized with its unprecedented comprehensive wavefront manipulation capacity validated through various beamforming functions, including beam focusing/steering, reconfigurable vortex beams, and tunable holograms, demonstrating a milli-second-level function-switching speed. The proposed methodology offers a paradigm shift for modulating electromagnetic waves in a non-resonating broadband fashion with fast-response and low-cost properties by exploiting functionalized LC-enabled metasurfaces. Moreover, this extremely agile metasurface-enabled antenna technology will facilitate a transformative impact on communication/sensing systems and empower new possibilities for wavefront engineering and diffractive wave calculation/inference.
AB - The rapid advancement of prevailing communication/sensing technologies necessitates cost-effective millimeter-wave arrays equipped with a massive number of phase-shifting cells to perform complicated beamforming tasks. Conventional approaches employing semiconductor switch/varactor components or tunable materials encounter obstacles such as quantization loss, high cost, high complexity, and limited adaptability for realizing large-scale arrays. Here, a low-cost, ultrathin, fast-response, and large-scale solution relying on metasurface concepts combined together with liquid crystal (LC) materials requiring a layer thickness of only 5 µm is reported. Rather than immersing resonant structures in LCs, a joint material-circuit-based strategy is devised, via integrating deep-subwavelength-thick LCs into slow-wave structures, to achieve constitutive metacells with continuous phase shifting and stable reflectivity. An LC-facilitated reconfigurable metasurface sub-system containing more than 2300 metacells is realized with its unprecedented comprehensive wavefront manipulation capacity validated through various beamforming functions, including beam focusing/steering, reconfigurable vortex beams, and tunable holograms, demonstrating a milli-second-level function-switching speed. The proposed methodology offers a paradigm shift for modulating electromagnetic waves in a non-resonating broadband fashion with fast-response and low-cost properties by exploiting functionalized LC-enabled metasurfaces. Moreover, this extremely agile metasurface-enabled antenna technology will facilitate a transformative impact on communication/sensing systems and empower new possibilities for wavefront engineering and diffractive wave calculation/inference.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85190262515&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1002/adma.202402170
DO - 10.1002/adma.202402170
M3 - Article
C2 - 38587064
AN - SCOPUS:85190262515
SN - 0935-9648
VL - 36
JO - Advanced Materials
JF - Advanced Materials
IS - 26
M1 - 2402170
ER -