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A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is an essential component in the architecture of the next generation of wireless communication systems. An RIS is deployed to provide a controllability to the multi-path environment between the transmitter and the receiver, which becomes critical when the line-of-sight signal between them is blocked. In this work, we design an electrically tunable linearly polarized RIS at 2.5 GHz that yields a controllable reflection phase and phase-frequency slope; in other words, we add tunability of the phase-frequency slope to the tunability of the resonance center frequency. The proposed design consists of two layers of unit cells placed over a ground plane, with dog-bone-shaped elements in the top layer and patch elements in the bottom layer. Each patch and dog-bone element is loaded with a varactor, whose reverse bias voltage is controlled to provide a phase-frequency profile with a slope value of 9 degrees/MHz or 0.95 degrees/MHz, and a phase shift range of 320 degrees., Comment: 2 pages, 4 figures, submitted to 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and ITNC-USNC-URSI Radio Science Meeting

The reflection characteristics of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) depend on the phase response of the constituent unit cells, which is necessarily frequency dependent. This paper investigates the role of an RIS constituting unit cells with different phase-frequency profiles in a wide-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system to improve the achievable rate. We first propose a mathematical model for the phase-frequency relationship parametrized by the phase-frequency profile's slope and phase-shift corresponding to a realizable resonant RIS unit cell. Then, modelling each RIS element with $b$ control bits, we propose a method for selecting the parameter pairs to obtain a set of $2^b$ phase-frequency profiles. The proposed method yields an RIS design that outperforms existing designs over a wide range of user locations in a single-input, single-output (SISO) OFDM system. We then propose a low-complexity optimization algorithm to maximize the data rate through the joint optimization of (a) power allocations across the sub-carriers and (b) phase-frequency profile for each RIS unit cell from the available set. The analysis is then extended to a multi-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) OFDM scenario. Numerical results show an improvement in the coverage and achievable rates under the proposed framework as compared to single-slope phase-frequency profiles.

The polarization density of a broadband electrodynamic lattice-Boltzmann method (ELBM) is generalized to represent frequency-dispersion of materials interacting with electromagnetic waves. The frequency-dependent refractive index and extinction coefficient are modeled using complex-conjugate pole-residue pairs in an auxiliary-differential-equation (ADE). Electric and magnetic fields are evaluated on a single lattice, ensuring a stable numerical solution up to the Nyquist limit. The electric and magnetic fields from the ELBM are compared with the electric and magnetic fields from the finite-difference-time-domain (FDTD) method. Accurate transmittance of a 100 nm silver slab is extracted from the transmitted power spectrum of a broadband Dirac-delta wave-function for photon energies ranging from 0.125-5 eV. Given this capability, the ELBM with an ADE is an accurate and computationally efficient method for modeling broadband frequency-dispersion of materials., Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, CodeOcean samples at doi: 10.24433/CO.5926359.v1

A transmission screen with subwavelength slots is described which can focus electromagnetic radiation to a two-dimensional subwavelength spot. Unlike negative-refractive-index focusing implementations, this "meta-screen" does not suffer from image degradation when losses are introduced and is easily scalable from microwave to Terahertz frequencies and beyond. The slotted geometry is designed using a theory of shifted beams to determine the necessary weighting factors for each slot element, which are then converted to appropriate slot dimensions. The screen was designed using a pair of rotated orthogonal focusing axes to produce a spot on a focal plane located 0.25 \lambda away. Full-wave simulations are corroborated by experimental measurements at 10 GHz reporting a full-width half-maximum beam width of 0.27 \lambda along the x-axis and 0.38 \lambda along the z-axis., Comment: 3 pages, 4 figures

Although negative-refractive-index metamaterials have successfully achieved subwavelength focusing, image resolution is limited by the presence of losses. In this Letter, a metal transmission screen with subwavelength spaced slots is proposed that focuses the near-field beyond the diffraction limit and furthermore, is easily scaled from microwave frequencies to the optical regime. An analytical model based on the superposition of shifted beam patterns is developed that agrees very well with full-wave simulations and is corroborated by experimental results at microwave frequencies., Comment: 5 pages, 7 figures. Content updated following reviewer comments to match final published paper