Metasurfaces, the two-dimensional counterpart of metamaterials, have caught great attention thanks to their powerful capabilities on manipulation of electromagnetic waves. Recent times have seen the emergence of a variety of metasurfaces exhibiting not only countless functionalities, but also a reconfigurable response. Additionally, digital or coding metasurfaces have revolutionized the field by describing the device as a matrix of discrete building block states, thus drawing clear parallelisms with information theory and opening new ways to model, compose, and (re)program advanced metasurfaces. This paper joins the reconfigurable and digital approaches, and presents a metasurface that leverages the tunability of graphene to perform beam steering at terahertz frequencies. A comprehensive design methodology is presented encompassing technological, unit cell design, digital metamaterial synthesis, and programmability aspects. By setting up and dynamically adjusting a phase gradient along the metasurface plane, the resulting device achieves beam steering at all practical directions. The proposed design is studied through analytical models and validated numerically, showing beam widths and steering errors well below 10 o and 5% in most cases. Finally, design guidelines are extracted through a scalability analysis involving the metasurface size and number of unit cell states.

Recent emergence of metasurfaces has enabled the development of ultra-thin flat optical components through different wavefront shaping techniques at various wavelengths. However, due to the non-adaptive nature of conventional metasurfaces, the focal point of the resulting optics needs to be fixed at the design stage, thus severely limiting its reconfigurability and applicability. In this paper, we aim to overcome such constraint by presenting a flat reflective component that can be reprogrammed to focus terahertz waves at a desired point in the near-field region. To this end, we first propose a graphene-based unit cell with phase reconfigurability, and then employ the coding metasurface approach to draw the phase profile required to set the focus on the target point. Our results show that the proposed component can operate close to the diffraction limit with high focusing range and low focusing error. We also demonstrate that, through appropriate automation, the reprogrammability of the metamirror could be leveraged to develop compact terahertz scanning and imaging systems, as well as novel reconfigurable components for terahertz wireless communications.

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This paper presents a novel tunable terahertz antenna based on a hybrid graphene-metal structure fed by a waveguide. First, the hybrid plasmonic waveguide is studied by analytical and numerical methods. Then, an efficient terahertz antenna is designed by an analytical approach using the transmission line model. The antenna performances are evaluated in the terahertz frequency band by a full-wave electromagnetic solver. Contrary to previous terahertz antennas based on graphene, the results show that the proposed antenna has satisfactory radiation efficiency and gain. Moreover, this study demonstrates that the reflection parameter of the antenna can be tuned by the chemical potential of graphene. The proposed antenna can be applied for terahertz applications such as wireless communication in interand intra-chip devices and sensing.

An efficient terahertz (THz) photoconductive antenna (PCA), as a major constituent for the generation or detection of THz waves, plays an essential role in bridging microwave-to-photonic gaps. Here, we propose an impressive approach comprising the use of arrayed zinc oxide nanorods (ZnO NRs) as an optical nanoantenna over an anti-reflective layer (silicon nitride) in the antenna gap to boost the photocurrent and consequently the THz signal. The numerical approach applied in investigating the optical behavior of the structure, demonstrates a significant field enhancement within the LT-GaAs layer due to the optical antenna performing simultaneously as a concentrator and an antireflector which behaves as a graded-refractive index layer. ZnO NRs have been fabricated on the PCA gap using the hydrothermal method as a simple, low cost and production compatible fabrication method compared to other complex methods used for the optical nanoantennas. Compared to the conventional PCA with a traditional antireflection coating, the measured THz power by time domain spectroscopy (TDS) is increased more than 4 times on average over the 0.1–1.2 THz range.

This study presents propagation properties of plasmonic slab waveguides based on graphene compared with noble metals. Transfer matrix theory as an analytical method and finite element method as a numerical approach are applied for analysis of one-dimensional plasmonic structures. Calculating the guided mode propagation constants of the waveguides, characteristics of the waveguides are compared by three factors: propagation length, spatial length, and electromagnetic field profile. The results obtained here are very helpful to the guidedwave applications in terahertz and infrared frequencies. Index Terms-Graphene, Noble metals, Plasmonic slab waveguides, and Terahertz,Recently, graphene, a one-atom-thick material consisting of carbon atoms bonded in a hexagonal lattice, is introduced as a planar plasmonic (metal-like) material [9-10]. The significant characteristics of graphene compared to noble metals (e.g. silver and gold) include low losses in THz and mid-infrared regimes, extreme confinement, mechanical strength, tunability of its complex conductivity by means of chemical doping, electric and magnetic fields. The unique properties of graphene make it a novel platform to implement highly integrated plasmonic devices [11][12][13][14][15][16][17].

In this paper, an analytical design procedure for multibeam metasurfaces with multiple feeds is presented. Considering arbitrary number of input and output beams, the required amplitude and phase distributions on the metasurface plane are theoretically derived without any optimization process. How the limitation of using only passive metasurfaces poses different challenges in the practical implementation of the amplitude profile is discussed. Then, to resolve these problems, a filtering procedure is proposed which effectively produces the desired output pattern. Moreover, the design method is verified through introducing a reflective metasurface with three input beams and sixteen output beams in arbitrary directions. It utilizes a graphene‐based unit cell providing simultaneous 2/2‐bit phase/amplitude modulation, that is, totally 16 states. For validation purposes, the analytical results are compared with numerical full‐wave simulation ones in which a good agreement between them is observed. In addition, by using the proposed design method, three different practical cases for wave manipulation functionalities, including power control, beam steering, and radar cross section (RCS) reduction capabilities are demonstrated. The presented approach paves the way for efficient design of the metasurfaces for a multitude of applications, including reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and multifunctional surfaces.

Graphene plasmonic antennas possess two significant features that render them appealing for short-range wireless communications, notably, inherent tunability and miniaturization due to the unique frequency dispersion of graphene and its support for surface plasmon waves in the terahertz band. In this letter, dipole-like antennas using few-layer graphene are proposed to achieve a better trade-off between miniaturization and radiation efficiency than current monolayer graphene antennas. The characteristics of few-layer graphene antennas are evaluated and then compared with those of antennas based on monolayer graphene and graphene stacks, which could also provide such improvements. To this end, first, the propagation properties of one-dimensional and two-dimensional plasmonic waveguides based on the aforementioned graphene structures are obtained by transfer matrix theory and finite-element simulation, respectively. Second, the antennas are investigated as three-dimensional structures using a full-wave solver. Results show that the highest radiation efficiency among the compared designs is achieved with the few-layer graphene, while the highest miniaturization is obtained with the even mode of the graphene stack antenna.