Ultra-wideband Reflection-type Metasurface for Generating Integer and Fractional Orbital Angular Momentum

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ultra-wideband reflection-type metasurface that efficiently generates vortex beams with various orbital angular momentum modes, expanding capabilities for microwave and optical communication systems.

Contribution

It presents the first wideband metasurface design based on phase control for generating diverse OAM modes, using an equivalent circuit model and broadband phase shift network.

Findings

Achieved broadband reflection from 6.75 to 21.85 GHz.

Successfully generated vortex beams with integer, fractional, and high-order OAM modes.

Experimental results closely match simulations, confirming effectiveness.

Abstract

Vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum are extensively studied owing to its potential to expand channel capacity of microwave and optical communication. By utilizing the Pancharatnam-Berry phase concept, an ultra-wideband single layer metasurface is proposed to realize the conversion from incident plane waves to reflected vortex beams covering a considerable bandwidth from 6.75 to 21.85 GHz . An equivalent circuit model combined with broadband phase shift network is developed to effectively design the meta-atoms in metasurface. It is the first time to design wideband metasurfaces with the phase-based characteristics. To verify the proposed model, some deformed square loop meta-atoms are proposed to construct the metasurfaces with broadband OAM characteristic. Moreover, the vortex beams with the integer (l = -3), fractional (l = -1.5), and high-order (l = -10) OAM mode are generated respectively. Based on an OAM spectral analysis, the mode purity of the generated vortex waves is discussed in detail. The experimental results achieve a good agreement with those obtained from the simulation, thus proving the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method.