Non-Local Metasurface-aided Leaky-Wave Antennas

TL;DR

This paper introduces a non-local terahertz metasurface integrated into a leaky-wave antenna, enabling wide-angle beam steering with stable performance across a broad frequency band, surpassing traditional designs.

Contribution

It develops a novel non-local metasurface design with an optimization framework and iterative synthesis for stable, wide-angle beam steering in terahertz antennas.

Findings

Achieves nearly 50-degree beam scanning over 2.0-2.7 THz

Demonstrates stable radiation performance across frequency variations

Improves beam-steering range threefold compared to local metasurface designs

Abstract

This work presents a non-local terahertz metasurface integrated into a leaky-wave antenna for robust, wide-angle beam steering. The metasurface encodes a holographic pattern by explicitly inducing tangential and normal susceptibilities, along with magnetoelectric coupling. This design maintains stable radiation performance even when the longitudinal wavenumber of the incident guided mode - and thus its effective impinging angle - varies as a function of frequency. In particular, we show that there exists a limit to achieving exact angular insensitivity and propose an optimization-based framework to obtain the required susceptibilities that closely approximate near angle-insensitive performance for stable beam-steering performance. Additionally, an iterative synthesis approach is introduced that maps abstract susceptibilities to physically realizable structures. Full-wave simulations demonstrate a beam-scanning range of nearly 50 degrees over the 2.0-2.7 THz band - a more than threefold improvement over conventional local-metasurface designs.