A new concept of the coding phase gradient metasurface (CPGM) is proposed, which is constructed using the phase gradient metasurface as the coding elements. Different from the previous coding metasurface (CM), both the coding sequences and gradient phases in the coding elements are designed to manipulate the electromagnetic (EM) wave for the CPGMs, and thus the manipulation will be more flexible. As an example, wide-band, wide-angle CPGMs with zero and non-zero phase gradient based on Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) phase are achieved using the co-polarization reflection unit cells under circularly polarized (CP) wave incidence. Both theoretically calculated and numerically simulated scattering patterns of the designed CPGMs demonstrate the expected manipulations. Additionally, two kinds of random CPGMs with different phase gradients are designed for radar cross section (RCS) reduction, and the measured RCS reveals a good accordance with the simulation.

In this paper, a transparent metamaterial absorber (MA) loaded with water substrate is presented, which can simultaneously achieve enhanced broadband microwave absorption and tunable infrared radiation. As a proof, the indium tin oxide (ITO) films are first introduced here as a frequency selective surface (FSS) on the top layer and reflective backplane on the ground layer. Next the distilled water combined with the polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) substrate is employed as a hybrid substrate in the middle. Simulation and experimental measurements show that the transparent water-substrate MA can achieve broadband microwave absorption with efficiency over 90% in the frequency band of 6.4-23.7GHz, and the proposed hybrid substrate has almost no influence on its original transmittance. Moreover, owing to the available water circulation system, the infrared radiation of the proposed MA is also demonstrated to be controlled by the temperature of the injected water. Based on its multifunction and high performance, it is expected that the proposed design may find potential applications, such as glass window of stealth equipment, electromagnetic compatible buildings/facilities, etc.

Naturally occurring water is a promising candidate for achieving broadband absorption. In this work, by virtue of the optically transparent character of the water, the water-based metamaterial absorbers (MAs) are proposed to achieve the broadband absorption at microwave frequencies and optical transparence simultaneously. For this purpose, the transparent indium tin oxide (ITO) and polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) are chosen as the constitutive materials. The water is encapsulated between the ITO backed plate and PMMA, serving as the microwave loss as well as optically transparent material. Numerical simulations show that the broadband absorption with the efficiency over 90% in the frequency band of 6.4–30 GHz and highly optical transparency of about 85% in the visible region can be achieved and have been well demonstrated experimentally. Additionally, the proposed water-based MA displays a wide-angle absorption performance for both TE and TM waves and is also robust to the variations of the structure parameters, which is much desired in a practical application.

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Distilled water has frequency dispersive characteristic and high value of imaginary part in permittivity, which can be seen as a good candidate of broadband metamaterial absorbers(MAs) in microwave. Here, an interesting idea based on the combination of water-substrate and metallic metamaterial in the three-dimensional construction is proposed, which can achieve outstanding broadband absorption. As a proof, the distilled water is filled into the dielectric reservoir as ultra-thin water-substrate, and then the water-substrates are arranged on the metal backplane periodically as three-dimensional water-substrate array(TWA). Simulation shows that the TWA achieves broadband absorption with the efficiency more than 90% from 8.3 to 21.0 GHz. Then, the trigonal metallic fishbone structure is introduced here between the water-substrate and the dielectric reservoir periodically as three-dimensional water-substrate metamaterial absorber(TWMA). The proposed TWMA could achieve ultra-broadband absorption from 2.6 to 16.8 GHz, which has increase by 64.8% in relative absorption bandwidth. Meanwhile, due to the participation of distilled water, the thermally tunable property also deserves to be discussed here. In view of the outstanding performance, it is worth to expect a wide range of applications to emerge inspired from the proposed construction.

This paper presents a three-dimensional microwave metamaterial absorber based on the stand-up resistive film patch array. The absorber has wideband absorption, lightweight, and polarizationindependent properties. Our design comes from the array of unidirectional stand-up resistive film patches backed by a metallic plane, which can excite multiple standing wave modes. By rolling the resistive film patches as a square enclosure, we obtain the polarization-independent property. Due to the multiple standing wave modes, the most incident energy is dissipated by the resistive film patches, and thus, the ultra-wideband absorption can be achieved by overlapping all the absorption modes at different frequencies. Both the simulated and experimental results show that the absorber possesses a fractional bandwidth of 148.2% with the absorption above 90% in the frequency range from 3.9 to 26.2 GHz. Moreover, the proposed absorber is extremely lightweight. The areal density of the fabricated sample is about 0.062 g/cm 2 , which is approximately equivalent to that of eight stacked standard A4 office papers. It is expected that our proposed absorber may find potential applications such as electromagnetic interference and stealth technologies. V C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx

Vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum have captivated great interest in the past few decades due to the inspiring application potential in both optical and microwave fields. More recently, assisted by Pancharatnam–Berry (PB) phase‐based meta‐atom, achieving spin–orbit‐converter becomes an encouraging topic. Commonly, however, spin–orbital‐converters are based on discontinuous phase distribution, which inevitably deteriorates their overall performance. To overcome this difficulty, here a paradigm of spin–orbital‐converter made of spirally arranged metastrip that can produce quasi‐continuously rotated phase profile with high‐efficiency is simulated and experimentally demonstrated in microwave regime. Using dispersion engineering, a meta‐atom capable of exciting spoof surface plasmon polaritons mode is designed to achieve PB phases. The metastrip consisting of a series of identical meta‐atoms is arranged along a proposed Archimedean spiral to obtain the rotated phase distribution of 4π. Near‐field performances reveal that the vortex electric distribution with topological charges of l = ± 2 can be generated. Significantly, this effort provides a strategy of achieving spin‐to‐orbital angular momentum conversion with phase continuity that may find applications in the fields of holography and communication systems.

The fast development of mid-wave infrared photonics has increased the demand for high-performance photodetectors that operate in this spectral range. However, the signal-to-noise ratio, regarded as a primary figure of merit for mid-wave infrared detection, is strongly limited by the high dark current in narrow-bandgap materials. Therefore, conventional mid-wave infrared photodetectors such as HgCdTe require cryogenic temperatures to avoid excessively high dark current. To address this challenge, we report an avalanche photodiode design using photon-trapping structures to enhance the quantum efficiency and minimize the absorber thickness to suppress the dark current. The device exhibits high quantum efficiency and dark current density that is nearly three orders of magnitude lower than that of the state-of-the-art HgCdTe avalanche photodiodes and nearly two orders lower than that of previously reported AlInAsSb avalanche photodiodes that operate at 2 µm. Additionally, the bandwidth of these avalanche photodiodes reaches ~7 GHz, and the gain–bandwidth product is over 200 GHz; both are more than four times those of previously reported 2 µm avalanche photodiodes.