A Broadband Vortex Beam Generator Based on Single-Layer Hybrid Phase-Turning Metasurface

Abstract

Vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) have become a research frontier due to the prospect of improving spectral efficiency and transmission capacity in communication systems. In this work, a hybrid phase-turning meta-atom that combines resonance and geometric (Pancharatnam-Berry) phase modulation is used to form a single-layer metasurface. A linearly polarized broadband vortex beam of mode l = −1 is obtained by the metasurface. An experimental prototype of the vortex beam generator has been fabricated and measured. The simulated and measured results demonstrate that the whole vortex beam generator exhibits over 70% mode purity from 26.5 GHz to 40 GHz (the relative bandwidth is 38.57%). In addition, a wide 3 dB gain bandwidth and low crosstalk are also provided by the proposed generator. This indicates that the proposed generator has important application value for vortex beam communication and its related applications.