Analysis and design of two-dimensional compound metallic metagratings using an analytical method

Abstract

The recently proposed concept of metagrating enables wavefront manipulation of electromagnetic (EM) waves with unitary efficiency and relatively simple fabrication requirements. Herein, two-dimensional (2D) metagratings composed of a 2D periodic array of rectangular holes in a metallic medium are proposed for diffraction pattern control. We first present an analytical method for diffraction analysis of 2D compound metallic metagrating (a periodic metallic structure with more than one rectangular hole in each period). Closed-form and analytical expressions are presented for the reflection coefficients of diffracted orders for the first time. Next, we verify the proposed method’s results against full-wave simulations and demonstrate their excellent agreement. As a proof of principle, two applications are presented using the proposed analytical method. The first application is a perfect out-of-plane reflector that transfers a normal transverse-magnetic (TM) polarized plane wave to an oblique transverse-electric (TE) polarized plane wave in the y − z plane. The second one is a five-channel beam splitter with an arbitrary power distribution between channels. Using the proposed analytical method, we designed these metagratings without requiring even a single optimization in a full-wave solver. The performance of the designed metagratings is better than previously reported structures in terms of power efficiency and relative distribution error. Our analytical results reveal that 2D metagratings can be used for manipulating EM waves in the plane and out of the plane of incidence with very high efficiency, thereby leading to extensive applications in a wide range of frequencies from microwave to terahertz (THz) regimes.