Designing Metasurfaces to Manipulate Antenna Radiation

Abstract

Designer manipulation of light at the nanoscale is key to several next-generation technologies, from sensing to optical computing. One way to manipulate light is to design a material structured at the sub-wavelength scale, a metamaterial, to have some desired scattering effect. Metamaterials typically have a very large number of geometric parameters that can be tuned, making the design process difficult. Existing design paradigms either neglect degrees of freedom or rely on numerically expensive full-wave simulations. In this work, we derive a simple semi-analytic method for designing metamaterials built from sub-wavelength elements with electric and magnetic dipole resonances. This is relevant to several experimentally accessible regimes. To demonstrate the versatility of our method, we apply it to three problems: the manipulation of the coupling between nearby emitters, focusing a plane wave to a single point and designing a dielectric antenna with a particular radiation pattern.