Polarizability Extraction for Waveguide-Fed Metasurfaces

Abstract

We consider the design and modeling of metasurfaces that couple energy from guided waves to propagating wavefronts. This is a first step towards a comprehensive, multiscale modeling platform for metasurface antennas-large arrays of metamaterial elements embedded in a waveguide structure that radiates into free-space--in which the detailed electromagnetic responses of metamaterial elements are replaced by polarizable dipoles. We present two methods to extract the effective polarizability of a metamaterial element embedded in a one- or two-dimensional waveguide. The first method invokes surface equivalence principles, averaging over the effective surface currents and charges within an element to obtain the effective dipole moments; the second method is based on computing the coefficients of the scattered waves within the waveguide, from which the effective polarizability can be inferred. We demonstrate these methods on several variants of waveguide-fed metasurface elements, finding excellent agreement between the two, as well as with analytical expressions derived for irises with simpler geometries. Extending the polarizability extraction technique to higher order multipoles, we confirm the validity of the dipole approximation for common metamaterial elements. With the effective polarizabilities of the metamaterial elements accurately determined, the radiated fields generated by a metasurface antenna (inside and outside the antenna) can be found self-consistently by including the interactions between polarizable dipoles. The dipole description provides an alternative language and computational framework for engineering metasurface antennas, holograms, lenses, beam-forming arrays, and other electrically large, waveguide-fed metasurface structures.