Abstract

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) is a promising degree of freedom for fundamental studies in electromagnetics and quantum mechanics. The unlimited state space of OAM shows a great potential to enhance channel capacities of classical and quantum communications. By exploring the Pancharatnam-Berry phase concept and engineering anisotropic scatterers in a metasurface with spatially varying orientations, a plane wave with zero OAM can be converted to a vortex beam carrying nonzero OAM. In this paper, we proposed two types of novel perfect electric conductor-perfect magnetic conductor anisotropic metasurfaces. One is composed of azimuthally continuous loops and the other is constructed by azimuthally discontinuous dipole scatterers. Both types of metasurfaces are mounted on a mushroom-type high impedance surface. Compared to previous metasurface designs for generating OAM, the proposed ones achieve nearly perfect conversion efficiency. In view of the eliminated vertical component of electric field, the continuous metasurface shows very smooth phase pattern at the near-field region, which cannot be achieved by convectional metasurfaces composed of discrete scatterers. On the other hand, the metasurface with discrete dipole scatterers shows a great flexibility to generate OAM with arbitrary topological charges. Our work is fundamentally and practically important to high-performance OAM generation.

Department(s)

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Comments

National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant 201309160052

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1089-7550; 0021-8979

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2024 American Institute of Physics, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

14 Feb 2016

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