Broadband circular and linear polarization conversions realized by thin birefringent reflective metasurfaces

Broadband circular and linear polarization conversions have been proposed in the paper by using thin birefringent reflective metasurfaces, which are composed of two orthogonal I-shaped structures placed on the top of a printed circuit broad with grounded plane on the bottom. We show that the metasurface manipulates the reflective phases of two orthogonal linearly-polarized waves independently by changing the dimensions of I-shaped structure. Hence, the polarization states of a linearly-polarized incident wave with normal incidence can be manipulated as desired after reflected by the anisotropic metasurface. Two polarization conversions have been presented by using such thin birefringent reflective metasurfaces: from linearly-polarized wave to circularly-polarized wave, and from linearly-polarized wave to cross-polarized wave. The metasurfaces work at microwave frequency, and the axial ratio better than 1dB is achieved within fractional bandwidth of 15% for circular polarization. Numerical and experiment results demonstrate good polarization conversions in a broad frequency band, which have excellent agreements with the theoretical calculations. (C)2014 Optical Society of America