Sliding metasurface for wide-angle beam steering with sharp frequency filtering
The advancement of electromagnetic technologies necessitates strategies to efficiently exploit spectral and spatial resources in increasingly congested and interference-prone environments. This paper demonstrates, for the first time, a fully passive sliding metasurface that unifies sharp frequency filtering and wide-angle beam steering within a single architecture, thereby establishing a two-dimensional frequency-angle selection window. The proposed metasurface replaces local phase reconfiguration with a global geometric displacement between two complementary phase profiles. This sliding strategy produces a controlled translation of the spectral centroid in reciprocal space, enabling continuous beam steering and suggesting extensibility to other frequency regimes. In the demonstrated implementation, a transmission-line-inspired design is adopted, in which stacked layers are strategically reused to form a quasi-Fabry-Pérot cavity within the meta-atom, enabling simultaneous phase modulation and frequency-selective filtering. Experimental results validate sharp spectral selectivity, ultra-wide out-of-band suppression, and stable beam steering over a ± 57° scanning range. The proposed sliding metasurface offers a compact and broadly applicable platform for next-generation electromagnetic systems, enabling a new modality for coordinated spectral-spatial wave control.
Authors
- Guangwei Hu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3023-9632)
- Jie Tian (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7452-1210)
- Weiren Zhu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6568-738X)
- Xinwei Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-1718-0438)
- Xiangming Wu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-1405-6231)
- Yufei Zhao
- Haoyang Shi
Institutions
- Nanyang Technological University (SG)
- Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Light Science & Applications
- Published
- 2026-07-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-026-02422-2
- Primary Topic
- Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai
- National Natural Science Foundation of China