Work in Progress: Intelligent Metasurface Holograms

Abstract

Intelligent metasurfaces are information metasurfaces driven by artificial intelligence (AI), which are designed for manipulating the electromagnetic (EM) wavefront and/or the carried dataflow in programmable and smart ways, and thus hold important potentials in the modern society. However, the design of intelligent metasurface hologram, i.e., the information-carrying coding pattern on the metasurface, remains an open challenging problem due to the complicated EM coupling effects between the meta-atoms of metasurface, especially for the accurate manipulation of EM wave information. Here, starting from the fundamental Maxwell's three-dimensional (3D) full-vectorial integral equations, we present a discrete optimization algorithm to design the intelligent metasurface holograms, which allows us to generate the desirable EM holography with very high resolution and efficiency even with 1-bit phased-coded intelligent metasurface. Selected simulation and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed strategy. The proposed method could be extended over the entire EM spectra and beyond in a straightforward manner, and could bring us important advances in various applications such as IoT, microscopy, security scanning, and so on.