Electrically Tunable Metasurface with Independent Frequency and Amplitude Modulations

Metasurfaces with actively tunable features are highly demanded for advanced applications in electronic and electromagnetic systems. However, realizing independent dual-tunability remains challenging and requires more efforts. Here, we present an active metasurface where the magnitude and frequency of the resonant absorption can be continuously and independently tuned through application of voltage biases. Such a dual-tunability is accomplished at microwave frequencies by combining a varactor-loaded high-impedance surface and a graphene-based sandwich structure. By electrically controlling the Fermi energy of graphene and the capacitance of varactor diodes, we experimentally demonstrate the independent shifting of the working frequency from 3.41 to 4.55 GHz and tuning of the reflection amplitude between –3 and –30 dB, which is in excellent agreement with full-wave numerical simulations. We further employed an equivalent lumped circuit model to elucidate the mechanism of the dual-tunability resulting from the graphene-based sandwich structure and the active high-impedance surface. We speculate that such a dual-tunability scheme can be potentially extended to terahertz and optical regimes by employing different active/dynamical tuning methods and materials integration, thereby enabling a variety of practical applications.