Experimental Verification of Reflectionless Wide-Angle Refraction via a Bianisotropic Huygens' Metasurface

TL;DR

This paper presents the first experimental demonstration of a bianisotropic Huygens' metasurface that achieves reflectionless wide-angle refraction at 71.8 degrees, verified through fabrication and comprehensive characterization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel bianisotropic metasurface design with three degrees of freedom, enabling reflectionless wide-angle refraction, validated by experimental measurements.

Findings

Negligible reflections confirmed in measurements

Majority of scattered power coupled to desired mode

First experimental verification of reflectionless wide-angle refraction

Abstract

We report the design, fabrication, and characterization of bianisotropic Huygens' metasurfaces (BHMSs) for refraction of normally incident beams towards 71.8 degrees. As previously shown, all three BHMS degrees of freedom, namely, electric polarizability, magnetic polarizability and omega-type magnetoelectric coupling, are required to ensure no reflections occur for such wide-angle impedance mismatch. The unit cells are composed of three metallic layers, yielding a printed-circuit-board (PCB) structure. The fabricated BHMS is characterized in a quasi-optical setup, used to accurately assess specular reflections. Subsequently, the horn-illuminated BHMS' radiation pattern is measured in a far-field chamber, to evaluate the device's refraction characteristics. The measured results verify that the BHMS has negligible reflections, and the majority of the scattered power is coupled to the desirable Floquet-Bloch mode. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental demonstration of such a reflectionless wide-angle refracting metasurface.