An Ultrathin, Fast-Response, Large-Scale Liquid-Crystal-Facilitated Multi-Functional Reconfigurable Metasurface for Comprehensive Wavefront Modulation
© 2024 Wiley‐VCH GmbH.
| Veröffentlicht in: | Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.). - 1998. - 36(2024), 26 vom: 27. Juni, Seite e2402170 |
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| 1. Verfasser: | |
| Weitere Verfasser: | , , , , , , , , , |
| Format: | Online-Aufsatz |
| Sprache: | English |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2024
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| Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk: | Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) |
| Schlagworte: | Journal Article beam steering liquid crystals metasurfaces reconfigurable hologram wavefront shaping |
| Zusammenfassung: | © 2024 Wiley‐VCH GmbH. 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 |
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| Beschreibung: | Date Revised 26.06.2024 published: Print-Electronic Citation Status PubMed-not-MEDLINE |
| ISSN: | 1521-4095 |
| DOI: | 10.1002/adma.202402170 |