Pulse-Driven Self-Reconfigurable Meta-Antennas

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pulse-driven reconfigurable meta-antenna that uses metasurfaces to dynamically alter antenna directivity based on electromagnetic pulse width, enabling advanced sensing and communication capabilities.

Contribution

It presents a novel antenna design leveraging metasurfaces loaded with circuits to reconfigure performance based on pulse width, expanding beyond traditional frequency-based control.

Findings

Demonstrated pulse width-dependent directional reconfiguration experimentally.

Enabled antennas to adapt their radiation patterns over milliseconds or billions of cycles.

Showcased applications in sensing, selective reception, and mutual communication.

Abstract

Wireless communications and sensing have notably advanced thanks to the recent developments in both software and hardware. Although various modulation schemes have been proposed to efficiently use the limited frequency resources by exploiting several degrees of freedom, antenna performance is essentially governed by frequency only. Here, we present a new antenna design concept based on metasurfaces to manipulate antenna performances in response to the time width of electromagnetic pulses. We numerically and experimentally show that by using a proper set of spatially arranged metasurfaces loaded with lumped circuits, ordinary omnidirectional antennas can be reconfigured by the incident pulse width to exhibit directional characteristics varying over hundreds of milliseconds or billions of cycles, far beyond conventional performance. We demonstrate that the proposed concept can be applied for sensing, selective reception under simultaneous incidence and mutual communications as the first step to expand existing frequency resources based on pulse width.