Guided-Wave-Excited Binary Huygens’ Metasurfaces for Dynamic Beamforming.

This letter presents a simple, yet effective method for dynamic beamforming that can be readily realized by integrating a tunable binary Huygens’ metasurface with a leaky-waveguide antenna. Heretofore, dynamic beamforming has been difficult to achieve owing to the challenges in attaining full 360 $^\circ$ of dynamic phase tunability, while also independently controlling the local aperture amplitudes from zero to unity. In contrast, the hereby proposed method only requires $\pm 90^\circ$ of dynamic phase tunability (with arbitrary transmission amplitudes), thereby significantly alleviating the stringent tuning requirements. In particular, the proposed method is obtained by leveraging the antenna-array and holography theories, and utilizing the idea of “virtual” electric line sources. Based on full-wave simulations, we demonstrate the versatility of the proposed method through the designs of a Huygens’-metasurface-assisted leaky-waveguide antenna that generates various complex far-field patterns such as sector beams and Dolph–Chebyshev patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]