Tie Jun Cui, Shuo Liu.
Information Metamaterials.
CUP. 2021
Metamaterials have attracted enormous interest from members of
the physics and engineering communities in the past 20 years,
owing to their powerful ability in manipulating electromagnetic (EM) waves.
However, the functionalities of traditional metamaterials are fixed at the time of fabrication.
To control the EM waves dynamically, active components are introduced to the meta-atoms,
yielding active metamaterials.
Recently, a special kind of active metamaterials, digital coding and programmable metamaterials
has been proposed that can achieve dynamically controllable functionalities
using field programmable gate array (FPGA).
Most importantly, the digital coding representations of metamaterials
set up bridge between the digital and physical worlds
and allow metamaterials to process digital information directly,
leading to information metamaterials.
In this Element, we review the evolution of information metamaterials,
mainly focusing on their basic concepts, design principles, fabrication techniques,
experimental measurement and potential applications.
Future developments of information metamaterials are also envisioned.