Sliding Metagratings for Dynamic Beam Switching via Rigorous Floquet-Bloch Theory

Wire-based metagratings, consisting of parallel arrays of periodic capacitively loaded wires which can be etched onto printed circuit boards (PCBs), have been shown capable of efficient control of waves. In particular, they can suppress Floquet-Bloch (FB) modes in undesired directions, thereby concentrating the energy of a beam in a given FB direction of interest. A method is presented herein to vary this beam direction by sliding the PCBs (and their resident wire arrays) to new locations, thereby providing a low-loss method of beam switching. The locations and distributed capacitive reactances of these wire arrays are determined by applying straightforward optimization techniques to a rigorous FB mathematical model. The efficiency of these beam switching solutions, verified using full-wave methods, are shown to exceed 90% for all designated radiation states.