Power flow–conformal metamirrors for engineering wave reflections

Abstract

Recently, the complexity behind manipulations of reflected fields by metasurfaces has been addressed, showing that, even in the simplest scenarios, nonlocal response and excitation of auxiliary evanescent fields are required for perfect field control. In this work, we introduce purely local reflective metasurfaces for arbitrary manipulations of the power distribution of reflected waves without excitation of any auxiliary evanescent field. The method is based on the analysis of the power flow distribution and the adaptation of the reflector shape to the desired distribution of incident and reflected fields. As a result, we find that these power-conformal metamirrors can be easily implemented with conventional passive unit cells. The results can be used for the design of reflecting surfaces with multiple functionalities and for waves of different physical nature. In this work, we present the cases of anomalous reflection and beam splitting for both acoustic and electromagnetic waves.