Active impedance metasurface with full 360° reflection phase tuning

Impedance metasurface is composed of electrical small scatters in two dimensional plane, of which the surface impedance can be designed to produce desired reflection phase. Tunable reflection phase can be achieved by incorporating active element into the scatters, but the tuning range of the reflection phase is limited. In this paper, an active impedance metasurface with full 360 degrees reflection phase control is presented to remove the phase tuning deficiency in conventional approach. The unit cell of the metasurface is a multiple resonance structure with two resonance poles and one resonance zero, capable of providing 3606 reflection phase variation and active tuning within a finite frequency band. Linear reflection phase tuning can also be obtained. Theoretical analysis and simulation are presented and validated by experiment at microwave frequency. The proposed approach can be applied to many cases where fine and full phase tuning is needed, such as beam steering in reflectarray antennas.