Discrete Huygens’ Metasurface: Realizing Anomalous Refraction and Diffraction Mode Circulation with a Robust, Broadband and Simple Design

Metasurfaces composed of subwavelength unit cells usually require a large number of unit cells which leads to complicated design and optimization. Aggressive discretization in metasurface designs can significantly reduce the number of unit cells within a period, resulting in large unit cell sizes. The enlarged unit cells will encounter negligible mutual couplings when combined together, hence making straightforward the process of metasurface design. These advantages combine to allow the design of a novel class of metasurfaces which support the high efficiency redirection of electromagnetic (EM) waves over a wide bandwidth and operation angle. Moreover, an aggressively discretized metasurface can realize diffraction mode circulation. In this work we propose a simple transmissive metasurface which can realize diffraction mode circulation by refracting plane waves from angles of -45°, 0°, 45° to angles of 0°, 45°, -45° respectively. The power efficiency of each anomalous refraction is more than 80% at the design frequency of 28 GHz, and the 3-dB power efficiency bandwidth is 11%. We fabricated and measured the metasurface, the experiment results agree well with the simulation results.