Perfect Plane-Wave to Surface-Wave Coupler Enabled Teleporting Conformal Metasurfaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces a conformal metasurface that perfectly converts an incident plane wave into a surface wave, transporting energy along a curved surface and re-radiating it at a different location, effectively teleporting the wave with control over amplitude and phase.

Contribution

It presents a novel design of a passive, lossless, conformal metasurface enabling perfect wave teleportation between disconnected ports using integral equations and impedance optimization.

Findings

Achieved perfect conversion of plane wave to surface wave

Demonstrated control over amplitude and phase of reradiated wave

Validated the design through integral equation modeling

Abstract

A technique for the design of conformal metasurfaces with two spatially disconnected space wave ports connected by a surface wave is presented. The passive and lossless metasurface absorbs the incident plane wave at port 1, converts it perfectly into a surface wave which transports the energy along an arbitrarily shaped/curved metasurface to port 2, then reradiates the captured power as a radiated field with control over its amplitude and phase. Since the incident field is seen to disappear at the input port and reappear at a spatially dislocated port as a new formed beam, the field can be said to have teleported. The metasurface consists of a single, conformal, spatially variant, impedance sheet supported by a conformal grounded dielectric substrate of the same shape. It is modeled using integral equations. The impedances of the sheet are optimized using the adjoint variable method to achieve the perfect teleporting operation from a passive and lossless metasurface. Possible applications include channel optimization for cellular networks, inexpensive power harvesting, sensing, around-the-corner radar, and cloaking.