Programmable VO2 metasurface for terahertz wave beam steering

Daquan Yang; Weiguang Wang; Erpeng Lv; Haiming Wang; Bingchao Liu; Yanzhao Hou; Jin-Hui Chen

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104824

Programmable VO₂ metasurface for terahertz wave beam steering

iScience. 2022 Jul 31;25(8):104824. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104824. eCollection 2022 Aug 19.

Authors

Daquan Yang^{1

2}, Weiguang Wang¹, Erpeng Lv¹, Haiming Wang³, Bingchao Liu³, Yanzhao Hou^{1

4}, Jin-Hui Chen⁵

Affiliations

¹ School of Information and Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China.
³ Lenovo Research, Beijing 100094, China.
⁴ National Engineering Laboratory for Mobile Network Technologies, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China.
⁵ Institute of Electromagnetics and Acoustics, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.

Abstract

Programmable vanadium dioxide (VO₂) metasurface is proposed at THz frequencies. The insulating and metallic states of VO₂ can be switched via external electrical stimulation, resulting in the dynamical modulation of electromagnetic response. The voltages of different columns of the metasurface can be controlled by the field-programmable gate array, and thus the phase gradients are realized for THz beam steering. In 1-bit coding, we design periodic and nonperiodic 24 × 24 coding sequences, and achieve wide-angle beam scanning with the deflection angles from -60° to +60°. In 2-bit coding, we use two different meta-atoms to design 18 × 18 coding sequences. Compared with 1-bit coding, 2-bit coding has more degree of freedom to control the optical phase, and 3 dB diffraction efficiency is improved by generating a single deflection angle. The proposed programmable metasurfaces provide a promising platform for manipulating electromagnetic wave in 6G wireless communication.

Keywords: Photonics; Radiation physics; Theoretical physics.