Microwave and THz Metamaterials

The Microwave and THz Metamaterials Special Interest Group (SIG) covers a wide range of topics, including reconfigurable and active structures, scattering and antenna applications, healthcare applications, multiphysics modelling, wearable devices, and mobile communications applications.

Members include industry and academic colleagues with an interest in novel theoretical concepts, modelling and numerical simulation, and manufacture and test.  We encourage discussions of new ideas and focus on developing talent within the sector.

We aim to deliver networking and technology showcasing events, connect skills and capabilities across the UK, and generate application based challenges.

Microwave & Wireless Metamaterials Roadmap

See, Stephen D Henthorn, Qammer H Abbasi, and Akram Alomainy et al, ‘Roadmap on Microwave and Wireless Metasurfaces’.

The Microwave & Wireless metasurfaces roadmap brings together expertise from academia, industry and government to outline an exciting period of development in the field as metamaterial products become increasingly present in the market. The authors attribute this change to telecommunications and the development of steerable antennas for satellite communications. Furthermore, as the authors note, ‘since 2019 there has been an explosion of interest in metasurfaces from the wireless communications theory community due to the concept of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces […] which can vary the reflected phase from many independently controlled elements, enabling some control of the wireless propagation channel.’

The authors have identified some remaining scientific challenges, such as the fundamental bandwidth limitations of metamaterials due to their resonant behaviour; that metamaterial behaviour is often heavily contingent on the incident angle of the electromagnetic wave to the material; and the difficulties of reconfigurability, particularly at higher frequencies. The authors also identify practical challenges in environments such as healthcare, and defence, where the metamaterials need to maintain their performance, despite vulnerability to variations in conditions. The greatest challenge identified is the integration of metamaterials into products and systems.

The roadmap looks towards solutions to these problems, and the authors have highlighted opportunities such as Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Additive manufacturing (although the latter poses difficulties in scale-up). The authors point out that an alternative and more scalable approach is the integration of metamaterial fabrication into existing mass production methods, such as roll-to-roll processing.