Inversed Design of Curved Acoustic Metasurface for OAM-based Information Storage and Reconstruction
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Metasurfaces with subwavelength structures have emerged as a breakthrough technology in the field of acoustic wave manipulation. Due to their compactness and flexibility, metasurfaces have become a key enabler for advanced technologies in communication, imaging, and sensing. There are two degrees of freedom (amplitude and phase) for the metasurface to modulate plane acoustic waves. While for the vortex wave one more degree of freedom can be provided, i.e., the orbital angular momentum (OAM). OAM of the vortex wave provides an additional orthogonal basis for multiplexing, enabling high-efficiency acoustic communication. As the demand for higher data storage and transmission increases, especially with the advent of 5G and future 6G networks, spectrum efficiency has become a crucial challenge. The researches on spatial multiplexing, OAM multiplexing and frequency multiplexing metasurfaces become hotspots, which allow for the simultaneous transmission of multiple independent data streams. However, the OAM multiplex transmission in free-space is fundamentally constrained by beam divergence and modal crosstalk, especially for higher-order modes. On the other hand, most existing metasurfaces are of linear or planar shapes, there is still a demand for further exploration of metasurfaces with curved surface which present more degrees of freedom and are of more practical interest. In this work, an inverse design framework based on the particle swarm optimization algorithm is proposed to suppress the modal crosstalk, which combines initial phase optimization of target OAM modes and geometrical configuration optimization of the metasurface. Four unit cells for a 2-bit coding metasurface are further designed for both numerical simulations and experiments. Numerical and experimental results verify the information transmission quality of the optimized metasurfaces. For spatial and frequency multiplexing, 3-bit coding metasurface are inversely designed to increase communication capacity. This study provides a promising foundation for advancing high-efficiency wireless communication systems.
