High-directivity multi-level beam switching with single-gate tunable metasurfaces based on graphene

Abstract

The growing demand for ultra-fast telecommunications, autonomous driving, and futuristic technologies highlights the crucial role of active beam steering at the nanoscale. This is essential for applications like LiDAR, beam-forming, and holographic displays, especially as devices reduce in form-factor. Although device with active beam switching capability is a potential candidate for realizing those applications, there have been only a few works to realize beam switching in reconfigurable metasurfaces with active tuning materials. In this paper, we theoretically present a multi-level beam-switching dielectric metasurface with a graphene layer for active tuning, addressing challenges associated with achieving high directivity and diffraction efficiency, and doing so while using a single-gate setup. For two-level switching, the directivities reached above 95%, and the diffraction efficiencies were near 50% at the operation wavelength ${\lambda}_0$ = 8 ${\mu}$m. Through quasi-normal mode expansion, we illustrate the physics of the beam switching metasurface inverse-designed by the adjoint method, highlighting the role of resonant modes and their response to charge carrier tuning. Under the same design scheme, we design and report characteristics of a three-level and four-level beam switching device, suggesting a possibility of generalizing to multi-level beam switching.