On the Use of Electromagnetic Inversion for Metasurface Design

TL;DR

This paper explores electromagnetic inverse source methods for flexible metasurface design, enabling tailored antenna performance and arbitrary shape specifications, with demonstrated 2D and 3D examples.

Contribution

It introduces an inverse source framework for metasurface design that handles arbitrary shapes and complex performance criteria, addressing key nonlinear optimization challenges.

Findings

Effective in designing metasurfaces with specified beam patterns

Handles arbitrary-shaped metasurface regions

Demonstrated with 2D and 3D simulated examples

Abstract

We show that the use of the electromagnetic inverse source framework offers great flexibility in the design of metasurfaces. In particular, this approach is advantageous for antenna design applications where the goal is often to satisfy a set of performance criteria such as half power beamwidths and null directions, rather than satisfying a fully-known complex field. In addition, the inverse source formulation allows the metasurface and the region over which the desired field specifications are provided to be of arbitrary shape. Some of the main challenges in solving this inverse source problem, such as formulating and optimizing a nonlinear cost functional, are addressed. Lastly, some two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) simulated examples are presented to demonstrate the method, followed by a discussion of the method's current limitations.