Dispersion engineering of metasurfaces for dual-frequency quasi-three-dimensional cloaking of microwave radiators

In this work, the design methodology and experimental investigation of compact and lightweight dispersive coatings, comprised by multiple layers of anisotropic metasurfaces, which are capable of cloaking radiators at multiple frequencies are presented. To determine the required surface electromagnetic properties for each layer, an analytical model is developed for predicting the scattering from a cylinder surrounded by multiple layers of anisotropic metasurfaces subject to plane-wave illumination at a general oblique incidence angle. Particularly, two different metasurface coating solutions with different dispersive properties are designed to provide more than 10 dB scattering width suppression at two pre-selected frequencies within a field-of-view (FOV) of ± 20° off normal incidence. Both coating designs implemented using metasurfaces are fabricated and measured, experimentally demonstrating the simultaneous suppression of mutual coupling and quasi-three-dimensional radiation blockage at the two pre-selected frequency ranges. At the same time, the functionality of the coated monopole is still well-maintained. The performance comparison further sheds light on how the optimal performance can be obtained by properly exploiting the dispersion of each metasurface layer of the coating. In addition, the cloaking effect is retained even when the distance between the radiators is significantly reduced. The concept and general design methodology presented here can be extended for applications that would benefit from cloaking multi-spectral terahertz as well as optical antennas.