Design of Holographic Metasurface for Antenna Beam Steering Based on Liquid Crystal Technology

This paper presents a novel design of holographic metasurface for antenna beam steering based on liquid crystal (LC) technology. It is demonstrated with detailed mathematical derivation that the radiation beam direction of the holographic metasurface is proportional to the permittivity of the substrate. For beam steering, LC is used as the tunable substrate since its effective permittivity can be varied. To verify the beam steering characteristics, a prototype is designed and numerical simulated. Simulation results show that the radiation direction scans from 33° to 45° at the fixed operating frequency of 17 GHz by tuning the permittivity of LC. Based on the frequency-beam-scanning property of the holographic metasurface, the radiation beam can be scanned from 23° to 55° while changing the frequency from 16 GHz to 19 GHz simultaneously.