Tunable two dimensional optical beam steering with reconfigurable indium tin oxide plasmonic reflectarray metasurface

In this paper, an electrically tunable reflectarray metasurface for two dimensional (2D) beam steering is designed by integration of a thin layer of indium tin oxide (ITO) material into a metal-insulator-metal (MIM) plasmonic unit-cell. The reflectarray is composed of square-shaped patch nanoantennas placed on a stack of insulator-ITO-metallic ground plane. The resonant characteristic of unit-cell and the accumulation of carrier density at the interface of ITO-insulator play key roles in obtaining over 250° of phase agility at around 218 terahertz (THz), by electrically varying the bias voltage. An array of unit-cells with integrated ITO and 2D voltage biasing distribution (from the side) offer the possibility of designing a reconfigurable antenna in which the main beam can be steered to relatively large angles in both θ - and φ - planes at carefully selected operating frequency. The significant advantage of this design is the dynamically adjustable radiation pattern in both azimuth and elevation planes even after fabrication.