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OPEN Random Combinatorial Gradient

Metasurface for Broadband,
Wide-Angle and Polarization-
Received: 11 April 2017
Accepted: 19 November 2017 Independent Diffusion Scattering
Published: xx xx xxxx
Yaqiang Zhuang1, Guangming Wang1, Jiangang Liang1, Tong Cai1, Xiao-Lan Tang2,
Tongfeng Guo2 & Qingfeng Zhang2
This paper proposes an easy, efficient strategy for designing broadband, wide-angle and polarization-
independent diffusion metasurface for radar cross section (RCS) reduction. A dual-resonance unit
cell, composed of a cross wire and cross loop (CWCL), is employed to enhance the phase bandwidth
covering the 2π range. Both oblique-gradient and horizontal-gradient phase supercells are designed for
illustration. The numerical results agree well with the theoretical ones. To significantly reduce backward
scattering, the random combinatorial gradient metasurface (RCGM) is subsequently constructed by
collecting eight supercells with randomly distributed gradient directions. The proposed metasurface
features an enhanced specular RCS reduction performance and less design complexity compared to
other candidates. Both simulated and measured results show that the proposed RCGM can significantly
suppress RCS and exhibits broadband, wide-angle and polarization independence features.

With the rapid development of detection and stealth technology, stealth military platform designs have attracted
more and more attention. Stealth technology is mainly classified into two categories: shaping and absorbing inci-
dent waves1–3. The former category of technology redirects scattered waves away from the backward direction,
whereas the second category transforms the incident waves into heat by loading radar absorber materials (RAM)
on the scatters. However, both of these technologies suffer from design complexity and a limited operational
band.
For the past several decades, metamaterials based on artificial structures have been proposed to achieve
intriguing electromagnetic (EM) properties that cannot be obtained by using materials in nature4–6. Metamaterials
are widely applied in stealth technologies, such as invisibility cloaks7–9 and perfect metamaterial absorbers
(PMAs)10,11. The invisibility cloak provides an efficient way to smoothly bend incoming EM waves around the
scatter, leading to an almost invisible object. However, their bulky structure, considerable thickness and extremely
narrow bandwidth largely limit their applications. Meanwhile, PMAs, which are based on electric and magnetic
resonances, suffer from a limited bandwidth as well. Therefore, it is highly desirable to develop a low-profile EM
device to suppress backward scattering energy over a wide frequency band.
The metasurface is a two-dimensional (2D) equivalent of metamaterials, which allows manipulation of the
propagation behavior of EM waves in a sub-wavelength scale along the propagation direction12–15. It can serve
as an alternative approach to address the bandwidth and thickness issues of metamaterial-based stealth technol-
ogy. Recently, many RCS reduction techniques using metasurfaces have been comprehensively demonstrated in
both microwave and terahertz frequencies16–35. In ref.16, an artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) and a perfect
electric conductor (PEC) arranged in a thin layer using a chessboard-like configuration were proposed to divide
the scattering wave into four main lobes along the diagonal directions. Later, a combination of hexagonal and
triangle AMC structures in a chessboard-like configuration was introduced to enhance the operational band-
width and to further reduce the bistatic RCS17,18. A phase gradient metasurface (PGM) was also proposed to steer
backscatter waves to predefined directions19,20. However, both chessboard-like metasurfaces and PGMs present a

1
Air and Missile Defense College, Air Force Engineering University, Xi’an, 710051, China. 2Southern University of
Science and Technology, Shenzhen, 518055, China. Yaqiang Zhuang and Xiao-Lan Tang contributed equally to this
work. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to G.W. (email: [email protected]) or Q.Z.
(email: [email protected])

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fixed scattering angle and relatively high bistatic RCS. To overcome these drawbacks, diffusion metasurfaces have
been proposed to randomly diffuse the scattering waves into the upper half of space21–35. The diffusion metas-
urfaces were realized by arranging meta-particles in a size-variant or orientation-variant manner, resulting in a
broadband and wide-angle RCS reduction with low-profile properties21–28. Although some diffusion metasurfaces
were also designed with the aid of an optimization algorithm to achieve excellent low-scattering performances in
microwave and terahertz frequencies29–34, the random distribution approach is much more efficient. It provides
a good tradeoff between performance and design complexity. In ref.35,a new concept of coding phase gradient
metasurface was proposed to manipulate the scattering waves with more flexibility, which was realized by design-
ing an identical phase gradient into each coding element. However, diffusion was achieved by randomly coding
the initial phase of the coding element, and the RCS reduction mechanism is similar to that of conventional
diffusion metasurfaces. In ref.36,a dual-layer, anisotropic CWCL unit cell was used to design a bifunctional meta-
surface by orthogonal excitations.
To date, most of the diffusion metasurfaces have been realized by randomly arranging supercells, and each
supercell consists of uniform unit cells21–34. However, the specular reflection of this type of diffusion metasurface
cannot be dissolved. In this paper, a novel diffusion strategy is proposed for diffuse scattering in various direc-
tions and away from the specular reflection direction. The strategy was realized using a combination of supercells
possessing different phase gradient directions instead of different phases and features an easy design and efficient
manipulation of the scattering waves. Eight types of supercells were designed to deflect the scattering into eight
different directions with a step of π/4 across the azimuth plane. Randomly arranging these supercells enables one
to completely disturb the phase coherences of the different unit cells and to facilitate the diffusion scatterings. The
designed diffusion metasurface features a broadband, wide-angle and polarization-independent performance in
RCS reduction.

Results
Design Principle. The array antenna theory is used to illustrate the working mechanism of the random com-
binatorial gradient metasurface. Considering a metasurface composed of M × N elements under a normal plane
wave incidence, the scattering patterns of the entire metasurface can be expressed by superposing the contribu-
tions of all the elements, as shown in Eq. (1).
 
( )
E total = ∑∑Em , nexpjk 0 mdx sin θ cos ϕ + nd y sin θ sin ϕ 
 (1)
m n

where Em , n is the electric far-field pattern of the element (m, n); θ and ϕ are the elevation and azimuth angles,
respectively; dx and dy denote the element period along the x and y directions, respectively; and k0 is the wave
number in free space. Due to the all-reflection property of the elements, we can assume that these elements have
identical scattering patterns and uniform reflection magnitudes but different reflection phases. Therefore, the
electric field of each element is
 
Em , n = exp(jϕmn)E1 (2)
Upon substitution into Eq. (1), this leads to
  
E total = E1∑∑exp[j(ϕmn + k 0mdx sin θ cos ϕ + k 0nd y sin θ sin ϕ)] = E1 ⋅ AF
m n (3)

where E1 is the electric far-field pattern of the basic element; and AF is the array factor. Since each element in a
conventional random-diffusion metasurface is composed of several homogeneous unit cells, the scattering pat-
tern of the entire metasurface is only determined by the configuration of the element. To manipulate the scatter-
ing pattern more flexibly, an additional gradient phase is added into the element. The phase gradient metasurface
can redirect the reflection waves to a desired direction with respect to the phase gradient. Here, we design eight
types of phase gradient elements (including horizontal, vertical and oblique directions in the phase gradient)
across the azimuth plane. As shown in Fig. 1, each element is composed of 6 × 6 unit cells, and the phase gradient
direction is rotated counterclockwise with a step of 45°.
To demonstrate the anomalous reflections of the proposed elements, we calculated the scattering patterns
of the horizontal-gradient, oblique-gradient, and random combinatorial gradient metasurface under a normal
incidence, as shown in Fig. 2. All the scattering patterns were normalized to their maximum intensity. Note in
Fig. 2(a) and (b) that the reflected beams are reflected into different directions for both the horizontal-gradient
and oblique-gradient cases. Therefore, one expects that a metasurface constructed by randomly distributing these
eight types of elements can disperse scattering waves into various directions with very low backward scattering.
Figure 2(c) shows the theoretical scattering pattern of a random combinatorial gradient metasurface consisting of
4 × 4 elements, which is consistent with our expectation.

Unit Cell Design. To enhance the operational bandwidth, an isotropic, dual-resonance unit cell is employed
as the basic reflective phasing element36, as shown in Fig. 3. The unit cell is a sandwich-like structure with a metal-
lic structure on the top layer, an F4B substrate (with a thickness, h, of 3 mm and a dielectric constant of 2.65) in
the middle, and a metallic ground plane as the bottom layer. The metallic structure is composed of a cross wire
and cross loop, leading to two resonance frequencies close to each other. Furthermore, the proposed unit cell is
an almost isotropic structure, which makes it insensitive to the polarization of the incident wave. An enhanced
operational bandwidth and improved reflection phase range can be achieved. To efficiently manipulate the reflec-
tion phase, the optimum dimensions of the unit cell are chosen as p = 10 mm, a = 0.4 mm, and w = 2.4 mm. The

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Figure 1. Phase distributions of the eight types of phase gradient elements.

Figure 2. Theoretical scattering patterns of the (a) horizontal-gradient element, (b) oblique-gradient element,
and (c) random combinatorial gradient metasurface.

Figure 3. The front view (left) and side view (right) of the unit cell.

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Figure 4. The reflection phases (a) for different values of l versus the frequency and (b) at different frequencies
versus l.

Figure 5. The 3D far-field scattering pattern for the (a) oblique-gradient case and (b) horizontal-gradient case
at 10 GHz.

simulated reflection phases are plotted in Fig. 4, which shows that the reflection phase can be manipulated with
a variation of l. It is clearly seen in Fig. 4(a) that the curves are quite linear, and they are almost parallel to the
variation of l, leading to an excellent broadband response. As shown in Fig. 4(b), the reflection phase curves at
different frequencies with a variation of l are almost parallel as well, which is important to ensure a wide opera-
tional bandwidth.

Phase Gradient Supercell Element. As a special type of metasurface, PGM has been widely used to
achieve anomalous reflection performance. By delicately designing the phase gradient on PGM, the reflected
wave can be redirected in the desired direction. As illustrated in Fig. 1, eight types of supercells must be imple-
mented using the proposed unit cell in Fig. 3. As an example, the design approach for the oblique-gradient phase
and horizontal-gradient phase supercell is shown. Other types can be designed in a similar manner.
In the oblique-gradient case, the phase gradient can be projected in both the x and y direction, leading to an
out-of-plane anomalous reflection. The reflected wave can be characterized by two angles, θr and ϕr, which repre-
sent the reflected elevation angle and azimuth angle, respectively. As depicted in Fig. 5, we employ six unit cells
with identical phase gradients along the x and y directions, i.e., d Φ /dx = d Φ /dy . In the case of the
oblique-gradient phase, the generalized Snell’s law is illustrated as:

2 2
 dΦ   
sin θr − sin θi =
λ0
  +  d Φ 
2πni  dx   dy  (4)
where θr and θi are the reflection elevation angle and incidence angle, respectively; λ0 is the wavelength in free
space; ni represents the refractive index of the incidence medium; and d Φ /dx (d Φ /dy ) denotes the phase gradient
along the x (y) direction. To realize a broadband anomalous reflection performance and to efficiently suppress
backward RCS, we employ six unit cells to realize a phase gradient covering a 2π range to guarantee a preferable
performance. Upon substitution of d Φ /dx = d Φ /dy , Eq. (4) is reduced to

2 λ 0 dΦ
sin θr − sin θi =
2πni dx (5)
The phase shift across a single unit cell is ∆Φ = 2π /n, where n is the number of unit cells. Therefore, the phase
gradient is computed as d Φ /dx = ∆Φ /p = 2π /np . Under normal incidence, θ r is computed as

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Figure 6. The normalized scattering intensity spectra of the simulated and theoretical results in (a) the diagonal
plane for the oblique-gradient case and (b) xoz plane for the horizontal-gradient case under normal incidence.
The star-shaped markers represent the traces of the theoretical maximum-intensity points.

Figure 7. The RCS reduction spectra for the (a) oblique-gradient case and (b) horizontal-gradient case.

θr = arcsin( 2 λ 0/np). Since the azimuth angle, ϕr, satisfies the condition tan ϕr = (d Φ /dy )/(d Φ /dx ) = 1, it is
fixed at 45°. In other words, the reflected waves are redirected in the diagonal plane. The oblique-gradient phase
can be reduced to the horizontal-gradient phase when d Φ /dy = 0. Therefore, the reflection angle in the
horizontal-gradient case is calculated as θr = arcsin(λ 0/np) and ϕr = 0°.
As an example, six unit cells with l = 3.6 mm, 4.23 mm, 4.72 mm, 5.27 mm, 6.04 mm and 6.77 mm are employed
to design the oblique-gradient and horizontal-gradient supercells, as shown in Fig. 5. The phase-shift interval is
∆Φ = 60° across each unit cell at 10 GHz. Both PGMs constructed by 4 × 4 supercells with 240 mm × 240 mm
illuminated by a normal x-polarized plane wave were simulated in the CST Microwave Studio. The
three-dimensional (3D) far-field scattering patterns are shown in Fig. 5. As expected, an out-of-plane anomalous
reflection is realized for the oblique-gradient case, whereas the reflected waves are effectively redirected in a pre-
defined direction in the xoz plane for the horizontal-gradient case. Furthermore, the normalized scattering inten-
sity spectra are depicted in Fig. 6. The star-shaped marker in Fig. 6 denotes the theoretical value of the reflection
angles, which was calculated by θr = arcsin( 2 λ 0/np) and θr = arcsin(λ 0/np). The excellent agreement between
the simulated and theoretical results indicates that the reflected energies are redirected in the predefined direc-
tion. In addition, this is the reason why the RCS can be reduced more than 10 dB within 8.2–15.1 GHz and 8.0–
14.9 GHz for the oblique-gradient and horizontal-gradient, respectively, as shown in Fig. 7. One should note that
this proposed scheme can arbitrarily manipulate the azimuth angle of the reflection by employing phase gradient
supercells in different azimuth directions. However, the reflected elevation angles cannot be arbitrarily
controlled.

Random Combinatorial Gradient Metasurface. As demonstrated above, the PGM can redirect the
reflected waves to the desired direction with a high efficiency and broad operational band. To diffuse the reflec-
tion into various directions, one may randomly distribute different types of supercells to design the diffusion
metasurface. Here, eight types of phase gradient supercells are employed across the azimuth plane. Therefore, a
3-bit coding method was adopted, and each type of phase gradient supercell was defined as a coding element, as

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Figure 8. (a) Schematic of the 3-bit coding principle with eight types of phase gradient directions and (b) the
layout of a certain RCGM (layout I).

Figure 9. Monostatic RCS reduction of the (a) three layouts for x-polarized waves and (b) layout I for both x-
and y-polarized waves under a normal incidence.

shown in Fig. 8(a). Although there are many possibilities to determine the random sequence, three certain layouts
in a finite sheet of 240 mm × 240 mm were investigated without a loss of generality. The different layouts were
designed according to three pseudorandom 3-bit coding sequences generated by MATLAB. The entire metasur-
face was composed of 16 elements. Figure 8(b) shows layout I for this approach.
Full-wave simulations of the three RCGM layouts were carried out in the CST Microwave Studio to validate
the diffusion scattering performance. Figure 9(a) and (b) show the RCS reduction spectra of the three layouts
and that of layout I in Fig. 8(b) under both x- and y-polarized plane wave normal incidences. The RCS reduction
value is calculated using the reflection of a metallic plate with the same size as the reference. Note that all three
RCGMs exhibit very similar curves and suppress the RCS by more than 10 dB within the frequency band from
7.1 to 15.6 GHz. For simplification, only layout I is investigated in the following section. As shown in Fig. 9(b),
the proposed RCGM is insensitive to the polarizations, and the maximum RCS reduction value reaches 40 dB at
10.3 GHz. The slight frequency shift of 0.3 GHz is probably because the unit cell is designed using periodic bound-
ary conditions for identical unit cells, whereas random unit cells are used in the final layout. Figure 10(a–c),(d–f)
and (g–i) illustrate the simulated 3D far-field scattering patterns of RCGM under x- and y-polarized wave inci-
dences and those of a metallic plate at 7.3, 10.3, and 13.3 GHz. It can be clearly seen that the diffusion behaviors
of the scattered fields are observed in a wide frequency band, which contrasts with the case with a metallic plate.
Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that no reflection occurs in the specular direction at 10.3 GHz, which corre-
sponds to the minimum value in the RCS reduction spectra (see Fig. 9(b)). Also, the scattering patterns are almost
the same for both the x- and y-polarized wave incidences. Thus, the proposed metasurface can suppress backward
scattering for polarization-independent incident waves, which is very useful in practical applications.
To provide a comprehensive understanding of the angular performance of RCGM, the RCS reduction in the
specular direction under oblique incidence is also investigated. Both x- and y- polarized waves from 15°, 30°
and 45° are considered. As shown in Fig. 11, the RCS reduction performance gradually degraded due to phase

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Figure 10. The 3D RCS patterns of RCGM under (a,d,g) x- and (b,e,h) y-polarized incident waves; (c,f,h) a
metallic plate under x-polarized wave excitation at (a–c) 7.3 GHz, (d–f) 10.3 GHz and (g–i) 13.3 GHz.

Figure 11. Monostatic RCS reduction under (a) x- and (b) y-polarized oblique incidences.

aberrations with the increase in the incidence angle. However, a 6 dB RCS reduction can still be achieved in
a broad frequency band which means less than 25% of the power is reflected back in the specular direction.
Moreover, the peak exhibits a redshift as the incident angle increases, which is also attributed to the phase altera-
tion. To demonstrate the diffusion performance of the RCGM under oblique incidence, the scattering spectra in
the backward space of the RCGM under oblique incidence at 10.3 GHz are given in Fig. 12, and the spectra of a
metallic plate is also afforded in the same color map scale for comparison. It can be clearly observed that most of
the scattering energy was dispersed into numerous off-specular directions for the RCGM, which is totally differ-
ent from the scattering distribution of the metallic plate. Therefore, both monostatic RCS and bistatic RCS were
effectively suppressed.

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Figure 12. The scattering spectra of (a–c) RCGM and (d–f) a metallic plate under y-polarized wave incidences
with different oblique incidence angles (15°, 30° and 45°) at 10.3 GHz.

Figure 13. Photograph of the fabricated prototype (left) and the measurement setup(right).

Fabrication and measurement result. To validate the performance of the proposed RCGM, a prototype
was fabricated and measured. Figure 13 shows the photograph of the fabricated prototype and the experimental
setup for the normal incidence. The inset in the upper-left of Fig. 13(b) shows the detailed setup of the transmit-
ter and receiver. The prototype was manufactured by a stand print circuit board process technology. The upper
metallic structure layer and bottom ground layer were 0.036 mm thick copper, and the middle dielectric substrate
layer was an F4B board with a dielectric constant of 2.65 and a loss tangent of 0.001. The fabricated prototype,
which has the same pattern as layout I in the simulation (Fig. 8(b)), has a total size of 240 mm × 240 mm. Two
identical, wideband, ridged horn antennas operating from 1 to 18 GHz were used as the transmitter and receiver.
The reflections of a purely metallic plate were also measured as a reference. Figure 14 shows the measured results
of the RCS reduction spectra under x- and y-polarized waves impinging from 0°, 15°, 30° and 45° angles. Note
that the RCS can be reduced by more than 6 dB within a wide frequency range under incidence angles less than
45°. Furthermore, the change tendency is consistent with the simulation results with the increment of the incident
angle. Considering the fabrication and measurement errors, reasonable agreement can be found between the
measured and simulated results.

Discussion
In summary, a novel strategy to realize a diffusion metasurface was proposed for reducing the RCS with broad-
band, wide-angle and polarization-independent features. A prototype was constructed by randomly distributing
eight types of PGM supercells on a metasurface. Each supercell was composed of six CWCL unit cells with a
special phase gradient direction. The CWCL unit cell was employed to broaden the operational band covering the

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Figure 14. The measurement results of the RCS reduction for various incident angles; (a) x-polarized and (b)
y-polarized waves.

2π phase range. Since the anomalous reflection angle of the regular PGM was determined by the phase gradient,
the metasurface using different PGM supercells can scatter the incident waves to various directions in the back-
ward half space. Both the simulated and measured results demonstrated that the designed metasurface effectively
suppressed the backward RCS within the frequency range of 7.2–15.6 GHz. Furthermore, low reflection features
were still maintained for wide-angle oblique incidences, various polarizations, and broadband operations. This
work provides a new approach for suppressing the backward RCS.

Methods
Simulation. All the full-wave simulations were carried out by the commercial software, CST Microwave
Studio. The frequency domain solver was utilized for the unit cell simulation. In addition, the unit cell boundary
and open boundary were applied for both the x and y directions and the z direction, respectively. The full model
of the metasurface was simulated by a time domain solver, and an open (add space) boundary was applied in all
directions.

Measurement. The reflection measurements were conducted in a microwave anechoic chamber. A pair of
identical, wideband, ridged horn antennas was used as the transmitter and receiver, and the pair was connected
to a vector network analyzer (AV 3672B). In the normal incidence case, the two antennas were placed in front of
the prototype at a distance of 3 m to satisfy the far-field measurement conditions. The antennas were placed at the
same height as the prototype in the measurement. To eliminate the interference of the environment, the function
of the time-domain gating in the network analyzer was adopted in the experiments. The reflection performance
was evaluated by the transmission parameter, S21, and the RCS reduction performance of the prototype was cali-
brated using a metallic plate that was the same size.

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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos 61372034 and
61401191, Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province under Grant No. 2016JM6063, Guangdong Natural
Science Funds for Distinguished Young Scholar (2015A030306032), Guangdong Special Support Program
(2016TQ03X839), Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Committee funds (KQJSCX201602 26193445,
JCYJ20150331101823678 KQCX2015033110182368, JCYJ20160301113918121, JSGG20160427105120572), and
Shenzhen Development and Reform Commission Funds under Grant [2015]944.

Author Contributions
Y.Z. and G.W. conceived the idea and performed the simulations. J.L. suggested the numerical simulations. Y.Z.,
X.-L.T. and T.G. contributed to the device fabrication and measurements. Y.Z., T.C., X.-L.T. and Q.Z. wrote the
manuscript. G.W. and Q.Z. supervised the project. All authors commented on the manuscript.

Additional Information
Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
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Scientific REPOrTs | 7: 16560 | DOI:10.1038/s41598-017-16910-4 10