Power-flow Conformal Metamirrors for Engineering Wave Reflections

TL;DR

This paper introduces power-flow conformal metamirrors that manipulate reflected wave power distributions locally without auxiliary fields, enabling easier implementation of multifunctional reflecting surfaces for acoustic and electromagnetic waves.

Contribution

The work presents a novel local metasurface design method based on power flow analysis, avoiding complex non-local responses and auxiliary fields required in previous approaches.

Findings

Successfully designed power-conformal metamirrors for anomalous reflection.

Demonstrated beam splitting for acoustic and electromagnetic waves.

Achieved simple implementation with conventional passive unit cells.

Abstract

Recently, the complexity behind manipulations of reflected fields by metasurfaces has been addressed showing that, even in the simplest scenarios, non-local response and excitation of auxiliary evanescent fields are required for perfect field control. Although these solutions theoretically allow to reflect incident plane waves into any desired direction, actual implementations are difficult and, in most cases, require extensive numerical optimization of the metamirror topology. In this work we introduce purely local reflective metasurfaces for arbitrary manipulations of the power distribution of reflected waves without excitation of any auxiliary evanescent fields. The reflected fields of such local metamirror contain only the desired propagating waves. The method is based on the analysis of the power flow distribution and the adaptation of the reflector shape to the desired distribution of incident and reflected fields. As a result, we find that these power-conformal metamirrors can be easily implemented with conventional passive unit cells.The results can be used for the design of reflecting surfaces with multiple functionalities and for waves of different physical nature. In this work, we present the cases of anomalous reflection and beam splitting, both for acoustic and electromagnetic waves.