Comparison Between Different Designs and Realizations of Anomalous Reflectors

TL;DR

This paper compares four main design approaches for anomalous reflectors, analyzing their performance in terms of efficiency, angular response, and scattering, to guide better design choices in metasurface engineering.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of different anomalous reflector design methods, including performance analysis and physical insights, aiding in selecting optimal designs.

Findings

Different design approaches show varying reflection efficiencies.

Performance depends on angular response and bandwidth.

The study offers physical insights into anomalous reflector behavior.

Abstract

Metasurfaces enable efficient manipulation of electromagnetic radiation. In particular, control over plane-wave reflection is one of the most useful features in many applications. Extensive research has been done in the field of anomalous reflectors over the past years, resulting in numerous introduced geometries and several distinct design approaches. Anomalously reflecting metasurfaces designed using different methods show different performances in terms of reflection efficiency, angular response, frequency bandwidth, etc. Without a comprehensive comparison between known design approaches, it is difficult to properly select the most appropriate design method and the most suitable metasurface geometry. Here, we consider four main approaches that can be used to design anomalous reflectors within the same basic topology of the structure and study the designed metasurfaces first on the level of the input impedance and then consider and compare the performance of the realized structures. We cover a wide range of performance aspects, such as the power efficiency and losses, angular response, and the scattering pattern of finite-size structures. We anticipate that this study will prove useful for developing new engineering methods and designing more sophisticated structures that include reconfigurable elements. Furthermore, we believe that this study can be considered referential since it provides comparative physical insight into anomalous reflectors in general.