Plasma reconfigurable metasurface technologies

Introduction

PULSE pursues the ambitious goal of defining a new technological horizon for implementing reconfigurable electromagnetic devices by unifying the research domains of metasurfaces with plasma physics.

Advantages of Plasma and Metasurfaces

The advantages returned by plasma when combined with metasurfaces are multiple:

1. Plasma allows overcoming the main limitations of conventional reconfigurability strategies.
2. It achieves an unprecedented tunability rate at high frequencies.
3. Plasma enables conceptually new scenarios in which the individual properties of the meta-atoms, and even their shape/size, can be time-modulated.

Project Aim

The project is aimed at fully merging two different research fields to establish a radically new technology (plasma metadevices) offering unprecedented possibilities.

Proposed Breakthroughs

To address this vision, several science-to-technology breakthroughs are proposed, including:

• Tunable lenses for antennas
• Non-reciprocal devices in waveguide technology
• Four-dimensional (4D) devices, in which the variation of the shape over time becomes an additional degree of freedom to achieve new effects at the fundamental level.

Technological Goals

PULSE's technological goals are beyond the state-of-the-art and outside any scientific and technological roadmap of the involved scientific communities.

Economic and Societal Impact

In addition, it is expected that PULSE will also have a dramatic economic and societal impact. The unprecedented functionalities of the plasma-based metadevices can address the increasingly stringent requirements of the next-generation telecommunication systems.

Consortium Composition

To achieve PULSE's ambitious scopes, the Consortium has been built for success in terms of industry and academic excellence. We have brought together a Consortium with a true European dimension, with eight beneficiaries from Italy, Spain, Finland, Greece, and Belgium.

Expertise and Equipment

Our expertise is interdisciplinary, complementary, and characterized by the appropriateness of equipment in all the involved scientific and technological domains.