In this paper, an ultra-wideband and polarization-independent metasurface for radar cross section (RCS) reduction is proposed. The unit cell of the metasurface operates in a linear cross-polarization scheme in a broad band. The phase and amplitude of cross-polarized reflection can be separately controlled by its geometry and rotation angle. Based on the diffuse reflection theory, a 3-bit coding metasurface is designed to reduce the RCS in an ultra-wide band. The wideband property of the metasurface benefits from the wideband cross polarization conversion and flexible phase modulation. In addition, the polarization-independent feature of the metasurface is achieved by tailoring the rotation angle of each element. Both the simulated and measured results demonstrate that the proposed metasurface can reduce the RCS significantly in an ultra-wide frequency band for both normal and oblique incidences, which makes it promising in the applications such as electromagnetic cloaking.

We propose an ultra-thin metasurface to control the amplitudes and phases independently of the reflected waves by changing geometries and orientations of I-shaped metallic particles. We demonstrate that the particles can realize independent controls of reflection amplitudes and phases with a magnitude range of [0, 0.82] and a full phase range of 360° in broad frequency band. Based on such particles, two ultrathin metasurface gratings are further proposed to form anomalous reflection with polarization orthogonal to the incident waves. The simulated and measured results of the presented metasurfaces show very good agreements. The proposed method has potential applications in engineering high-efficiency holography and complex electromagnetic and optical patterns.

A salty water antenna with beam-steering characteristics is proposed. The antenna combines the idea of the electronically steerable parasitic array radiator (ESPAR) antenna and the water antenna to realize a 360° beam steering. The unique features of water antennas such as transparency, reconfigurability and liquidity are fully utilized. Both the computer simulations and measurements are conducted to validate the performance. The proposed design has a frequency range from 334 MHz to 488 MHz ( $\text{S}_11$ < −10 dB), high radiation efficiency (> 60%), 13 different working states and a maximum gain of 5.8 dB. Compared with existing pattern reconfigurable liquid antennas, this new antenna has a wider bandwidth, more working states and better invisible ability. It is therefore a promising candidate for a range of VHF or UHF applications, such as internet of things (IoT) and maritime applications.

We propose ultrathin Huygens metasurfaces to control transmission amplitudes and phases of electromagnetic waves independently, in which each unit cell is comprised of an electric dipole and a magnetic dipole. By altering the electric and magnetic responses of unit cells, arbitrary complex transmission coefficients with modulus values smaller than 0.85 are obtained. Two Huygens metasurfaces capable of controlling the diffraction orders are designed and fabricated by modulating the distributions of the complex transmission coefficients. More complicated functions such as holographic imaging can also be accomplished by using the proposed Huygens metasurfaces.