Reflective Metasurface With Steered OAM Beams for THz Communications

Abstract

The abundant spectrum resources and low beam divergence of the terahertz (THz) band, can be combined with the orthogonal propagation property of orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams to multi-fold the capacity of wireless communication systems. Here, a reflective metasurface (RMTS) is utilized to enhance the coverage of the high gain THz OAM beams by enabling the non-line-of-sight (NLoS) component by reshaping the planar wavefront of the incident wave into the helical wavefront, so that it is re-directed towards the direction of interest. This can contribute to alleviating the concern of the small aperture size, since improving the channel capacity can be achieved at the low spectrum blocks of the THz band (larger aperture size). For validation, three $90 \times 90$ mm RMTSs are simulated, fabricated, and tested in the frequency range 90–110 GHz, to re-direct single and dual OAM beams towards the desired location.

Keywords

• Sixth-generation (6G)
• orbital angular momentum (OAM)
• reflective metasurface (RMTS)
• terahertz (THz)