Microwave seminar | 03 August 2020

Artificial complex media radically changed photonics and electromagnetics research in the past two decades, opening new avenues to mould electromagnetic fields with properly engineered polarizable particles. Devices with unprecedented performance and original solutions to fundamental problems have been proposed and demonstrated, mainly with metamaterials and metasurfaces, arrangements of closely-packed subwavelength unit cells governed by homogenization. In this talk, an alternative approach will be presented, relying on sparse complex media to exercise highly efficient control of the fields. The synthesis of these so-called metagratings is facilitated by tailoring the interference pattern formed by multiple scatterers using a reliable analytical model, without requiring time-consuming full-wave optimization. In addition to exploring theoretical and experimental results related to manipulation of beams in free space, we demonstrate how similar concepts and models can be harnessed to tackle problems in other configurations, such as rectangular waveguides and antenna arrays.