Metasurfaces have promising potential to revolutionize a variety of photonic and electronic device technologies. However, metasurfaces that can simultaneously and independently control all electromagnetics (EM) waves’ properties, including amplitude, phase, frequency, polarization, and momentum, with high integrability and programmability, are challenging and have not been successfully attempted. Here, we propose and demonstrate a microwave universal metasurface antenna (UMA) capable of dynamically, simultaneously, independently, and precisely manipulating all the constitutive properties of EM waves in a software-defined manner. Our UMA further facilitates the spatial- and time-varying wave properties, leading to more complicated waveform generation, beamforming, and direct information manipulations. In particular, the UMA can directly generate the modulated waveforms carrying digital information that can fundamentally simplify the architecture of information transmitter systems. The proposed UMA with unparalleled EM wave and information manipulation capabilities will spark a surge of applications from next-generation wireless systems, cognitive sensing, and imaging to quantum optics and quantum information science.

The sixth-generation (6G) communication technology is being developed in full swing and is expected to be faster and better than the fifth generation. The precise information transfer directivity and the concentration of signal strength are the key topics of 6G technology. We report the synthetic phase design of rotary doublet Airy beam and triplet Gaussian beam varifocal meta-devices to fully control the terahertz beam’s propagation direction and coverage area. The focusing spot can be delivered to arbitrary positions in a two-dimensional plane or a three-dimensional space. The highly concentrated signal can be delivered to a specific position, and the transmission direction can be adjusted freely to enable secure, flexible, and high-directivity 6G communication systems. This technology avoids the high costs associated with extensive use of active components. 6G communication systems, wireless power transfer, zoom imaging, and remote sensing will benefit from large-scale adoption of such a technology.

A novel wide-angle beam scanning phase synthesis method, namely, multi-beam phase matching method (PMM) is introduced in this paper. It takes full advantage of angle sensitiv-ity characteristic of reflectarray elements to improve the beam scanning performance of reflectarrays. In the process of reflec-tarray aperture synthesis, the beam deviation factors (BDF) and reference phases are optimized to minimize the total phase error, and the geometries of each element are optimized to match the desired phase shifts at multiple beam scanning angles after taking into account the real incident angles. Then, a 16×16-element re-flectarray antenna with square patch elements operating at 12GHz has been designed, simulated and fabricated. The meas-ured results show that a gain variation less than 1.7dB across the scan coverage from -45° to +45° can be achieved by mechanically rotating the feed antenna, which shows a considerable improve-ment in beam scanning performance as compared to the reflec-tarrays designed using conventional single-focus and bifocal methods.

In this paper, a novel 3-dimensional (3-D) printed circularly polarized (CP) modified Fresnel lens antenna operating at 300GHz is introduced. By virtue of the superior geometric flexibility of the 3-D printing technique, a modified Fresnel lens consisting of subwavelength discrete dielectric posts in the odd-numbered Fresnel zones is proposed. It is further demonstrated that by integrating dielectric anisotropic metamaterial, the modified Fresnel lens can realize CP radiation fed by a simple linearly polarized (LP) open-ended waveguide (OEWG). The 3-D printing approach is also investigated to push the performance envelops of the 3-D printer for realization of the THz CP lens. The measured results show that the axial ratios (AR) of the fabricated antenna prototype are smaller than 3dB from 265 to 320GHz. Moreover, the modified Fresnel lens has a maximum gain of 27.4dBic, which is 0.9dB lager than that of the conventional Fresnel zone plane antenna (FZPA). These validate the concept, the design, and the fabricated prototype.

A broadband single layer, dual circularly polarized (CP) reflectarrays with linearly polarized feed is introduced in this paper. To reduce the electrical interference between the two orthogonal polarizations of the CP element, a novel subwavelength multiresonance element with a Jerusalem cross and an open loop is proposed, which presents a broader bandwidth and phase range excessing 360° simultaneously. By tuning the x- and y-axis dimensions of the proposed element, an optimization technique is used to minimize the phase errors on both orthogonal components. Then, a single-layer offset-fed 20 × 20-element dual-CP reflectarray has been designed and fabricated. The measured results show that the 1-dB gain and 3-dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidths of the dual-CP reflectarray can reach 12.5% and 50%, respectively, which shows a significant improvement in gain and AR bandwidths as compared to reflectarrays with conventional λ/2 cross-dipole elements.