Active Cylindrical Metasurface With Spatial Reconfigurability for Tunable Backward Scattering Reduction

This article presents an active cylindrical metasurface with spatial reconfigurability to achieve dynamic control of the radar cross section (RCS) reduction. The proposed metasurface is designed based on the combination of microwave transmission network and Mie scattering. In particular, by modulating the spatial coding sequence of p-i-n diodes in meta-atoms, the surface impedance of the metasurface can be dynamically changed, which enables an active metasurface to operate in an expanded frequency band via time-division multiplexing technique. Both simulated and measured results demonstrate that the proposed cylindrical metasurface with an ultrathin thickness of 0.018λ can be continuously tuned across a wide fractional bandwidth over 32% for reducing backward scattering by 10 dB. The proposed metasurface with ultrathin thickness, tunability, conformal profile, and high performance may be applied to wideband RCS reduction, as well as advanced noninvasive detection, communication, etc.