Oz Diker has joined our group as a Master’s student 🙂

Welcome, Oz!

Our paper “Electrically thick Fabry-Perot omega bianisotropic metasurfaces as virtual antireflective coatings and nonlocal field transformers” by Dr. Sherman W. Marcus (Research Associate) and A. Epstein,  has been published in the Physical Review B. The paper shows how our previously introduced Fabry-Perot Huygens’ metasurface construct can be extended to realize omega-bianisotropic metasurfaces. Breaking the symmetry of the unit cells enables an accurate emulation of arbitrary inhomogeneous omega-bianosotropic profiles, while retaining the appealing anayltical model allowing effortless synthesis of the physical unit cell configuration. In addition to demonstrating (via simulations) that nonlocal field transformations previously proposed with abstract omega-bianisotropic metasurfaces can indeed be realized using the proposed configuration, we were able to harness a rigorous Floquet-Bloch analysis to show that under certain conditions, the bianisotropic metasurfaces can be viewed as a Huygens’ metasurface with the addition of a virtual anti-reflective coating. For refractive metasurfaces, this intriguing physical interpretation provides insight into the mechanism by which omega-bianisotropic metasurfaces realize perfect anomalous refraction, eliminating spurious coupling to specular reflection observed for Huygens’ metasurfaces.

In the Editorial Board meeting conducted during the (virtual) IEEE APS/URSI symposium (July 2020) it was announced that Ariel Epstein was selected as an Outstanding Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation for this year. Ariel has been acting as AE for the journal since 2018.

Amit Shaham, a Master’s student in the group, has been accepted to the direct track to Ph. D., and will continue in our group as a Ph. D. candidate.

 

Good luck, Amit!

M. Sc. student Amit Shaham was selected as a finalist in the 2020 IEEE APS/URSI Student Paper Competition for his paper “Plane-Wave Scattering off Sinusoidally-Modulated Metasurfaces with Normal Susceptibilities”.

Way to go, Amit!

This is the second time in a row that a student from our group appears in the finals (top 10) for this symposoium, with M. Sc. student Liran Biniashvili participating in the 2019 IEEE APS/URSI finals in Atlanta, GA.

Dr. Ariel Epstein is among the 147 Outstanding Referees of the Physical Review journals (a lifetime award), as chosen out of ~71,000 active referees by the journal editors for 2020.

 

Ph. D. candidate Oshri Rabinovich was chosen to receive the Jacobs Excellence Award for doctoral students for the year 2020. Congratulations!

Ph. D. candidate QI Chu, supervised by Dr. Alex M. H. Wong of the City University of Hong Kong, has been awarded with the PBC “Sandwich” Fellowship and will be working together with us in the next few months as a Visiting Research Student.

Welcome QI Chu! 🙂

Our paper “Fabry-Pérot Huygens’ metasurfaces: On homogenization of electrically thick composites” by Dr. Sherman W. Marcus (Research Associate) and A. Epstein,  has been published in the Physical Review B. The paper proposes a new physical structure to realize Huygens’ metasurfaces, relying on a symmetric cascade of two Fabry-Pérot etalons to construct the unit cells (meta-atoms). Due to the simplicity of the meta-atom configuration, the synthesis procedure can be done efficiently using a textbook analytical model. Remarkably, despite being electrically thick, the proposed geometry is shown to exactly reproduce the response of an abstract Huygens’ metasurface (represented by abstract boundary conditions – the GSTCs) implementing anomalous refraction. Using a detailed Floquet-Bloch formulation, the scattering from an arbitrary oblique angle of incidence is analyzed, yielding closed-form expressions for the dominant reflection and transmission, highlighting the robust emulation of the abstract boundary conditions by the Fabry-Pérot Huygens’ metasurfaces. We expect that these analytically designed structures would be very useful in practical demonstrations of intricate metasurface-based devices, whose complicated synthesis procedures posed challenges in terms of realization.