0.2 λ<sub>0</sub> Thick Adaptive Retroreflector Made of Spin-Locked Metasurface.

Yan, Libin; Zhu, Weiming; Karim, Muhammad Faeyz; Cai, Hong; Gu, Alex Yuandong; Shen, Zhongxiang; Chong, Peter Han Joo; Kwong, Dim-Lee et al. · Adv Mater · 2018

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

The metasurface concept is employed to planarize retroflectors by stacking two metasurfaces with separation that is two orders larger than the wavelength. Here, a retroreflective metasurface using subwavelength-thick reconfigurable C-shaped resonators (RCRs) is reported, which reduces the overall thickness from the previous record of 590 λ<sub>0</sub> down to only 0.2 λ<sub>0</sub> . The geometry of RCRs could be in situ controlled to realize equal amplitude and phase modulation onto transverse magnetic (TM)-polarized and transverse electric (TE)-polarized incidences. With the phase gradient being engineered, an in-plane momentum could be imparted to the incident wave, guaranteeing the spin state of the retro-reflected wave identical to that of the incident light. Such spin-locked metasurface is natively adaptive toward different incident angles to realize retroreflection by mechanically altering the geometry of RCRs. As a proof of concept, an ultrathin retroreflective metasurface is validated at 15 GHz, under various illumination angles at 10°, 12°, 15°, and 20°. Such adaptive spin-locked metasurface could find promising applications in spin-based optical devices, communication systems, remote sensing, RCS enhancement, and so on.