Infrared-controlled programmable metasurface

Ya-Lun Sun; Xin-Ge Zhang; Qian Yu; Wei-Xiang Jiang; Tie-Jun Cui

doi:10.1016/j.scib.2020.03.016

Infrared-controlled programmable metasurface

Sci Bull (Beijing). 2020 Jun 15;65(11):883-888. doi: 10.1016/j.scib.2020.03.016. Epub 2020 Mar 10.

Authors

Ya-Lun Sun¹, Xin-Ge Zhang¹, Qian Yu¹, Wei-Xiang Jiang², Tie-Jun Cui³

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China. Electronic address: wxjiang81@seu.edu.cn.
³ State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China. Electronic address: tjcui@seu.edu.cn.

PMID: 36747420
DOI: 10.1016/j.scib.2020.03.016

Abstract

Programmable metasurface enables controlling electromagnetic (EM) waves in real time. By programming the states of active device embedded in metasurface element, the EM properties of the digital metasurface can be changed quickly without redesigning their structures. However, large numbers of long-distance wires are required to connect the programmable metasurface to provide the coded signals from field programmable gate array (FPGA) when controlling the metasurface at a long distance, which is complicated and inconvenient. Here, we propose an infrared-controlled programmable metasurface that can be programmed remotely. The infrared transceiver is able to switch the coding sequences stored in the FPGA controller, thus controlling the voltage on the varactors integrated in the metasurface. Experiment is performed at microwave frequencies, and the measured results verify that the scattering beams of the metasurface sample can be changed remotely by using infrared ray. The proposed infrared-controlled programmable metasurface opens up avenues for constructing a new class of remotely-tuning dynamic metasurfaces.

Keywords: Beam scanning; Beam splitting; Infrared-controlled programmable metasurfaces; Remotely-tuning.