An Ultrathin, Fast‐Response, Large‐Scale Liquid‐Crystal‐Facilitated Multi‐Functional Reconfigurable Metasurface for Comprehensive Wavefront Modulation

• DOI: 10.1002/adma.202402170
• Publication Date: 2024-04-08T09:43:26Z
• Authors: Xin Yu Wu; Hong Yuan Feng; Fengshuo Wan; Meng Wei; Chong Guo; Longzhu Cai; Fan Wu; Zhi Hao Jiang; Lei Kang; Wei Hong; Douglas H. Werner
• Keywords: Modulation (music)

The rapid advancement of prevailing communication/sensing technologies necessitates cost-effective millimeter-wave arrays equipped with a massive number 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, complexity, and limited adaptability for realizing large-scale arrays. Here, low-cost, ultrathin, fast-response, solution relying on metasurface concepts combined together liquid crystal (LC) requiring layer thickness only 5 µm is reported. Rather than immersing resonant structures in LCs, joint material-circuit-based strategy devised, via integrating deep-subwavelength-thick LCs into slow-wave structures, achieve constitutive metacells continuous phase shifting stable reflectivity. An LC-facilitated reconfigurable sub-system containing more 2300 realized its unprecedented comprehensive wavefront manipulation capacity validated through various functions, including beam focusing/steering, vortex beams, holograms, demonstrating milli-second-level function-switching speed. proposed methodology offers paradigm shift modulating electromagnetic waves non-resonating broadband fashion fast-response low-cost properties by exploiting functionalized LC-enabled metasurfaces. Moreover, this extremely agile metasurface-enabled antenna technology will facilitate transformative impact systems empower new possibilities engineering diffractive wave calculation/inference.