Ray-Optical Evaluation of Scattering from Electrically Large Metasurfaces Characterized by Locally Periodic Surface Susceptibilities

TL;DR

This paper develops a raytracing method using surface susceptibility tensors to evaluate scattering from electrically large metasurfaces, providing a physically motivated and efficient approach validated against full-wave simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel raytracing framework based on GSTCs and susceptibility tensors for metasurface scattering analysis, improving physical insight and computational efficiency.

Findings

Framework accurately predicts scattered fields from complex metasurfaces

Validated against boundary element method simulations

Applicable to various metasurface configurations

Abstract

This work continues the development of the raytracing method of [1] for computing the scattered fields from metasurfaces characterized by locally periodic reflection and transmission coefficients. In this work, instead of describing the metasurface in terms of scattering coefficients that depend on the incidence direction, its scattering behavior is characterized by the surface susceptibility tensors that appear in the generalized sheet transition conditions (GSTCs). As the latter quantities are constitutive parameters, they do not depend on the incident field and thus enable a more compact and physically motivated description of the surface. The locally periodic susceptibility profile is expanded into a Fourier series, and the GSTCs are rewritten in a form that enables them to be numerically solved for in terms of the reflected and transmitted surface fields. The scattered field at arbitrary detector locations is constructed by evaluating critical-point contributions of the first and second kinds using a Forward Ray Tracing (FRT) scheme. The accuracy of the resulting framework has been verified with an Integral Equation based Boundary Element Method (BEM)-GSTC full-wave solver for a variety of examples such as a periodically modulated metasurface, a metasurface diffuser and a beam collimator.