Authors: Tie Jun Cui and Shuo Liu
Source: FERMAT, Volume 21, Communications 14, May-Jun., 2017
Abstract: Metamaterials are artificial structures composed of meta-atoms in subwavelength scale, which were traditionally described by effective medium parameters based on physical science, showing powerful ability in controlling electromagnetic waves and lights. From the perspective of information science, metamaterials were also represented by digital coding particles ‘0’ and ‘1’, resulting in information metamaterials. Shannon entropy was directly defined on coding and digital metamaterials to measure their information capacity quantitatively. Digital signal processing can be operated on coding and digital metamaterials to manipulate electromagnetic waves and information. Metamaterials were even programmable to realize real-time controls to the electromagnetic waves, generating new-concept information systems. The coming challenge in this branch is to develop software-defined metamaterials and cognitive metamaterials, which may cover all functions of radar, wireless communications, and high-resolution imaging simultaneously, breaking the limit of the modern information systems.
Index Terms: Coding metasurface, digital metasurface, programmable metasurface, information entropy, convolution, anisotropy, terahertz wave, diffusion, imaging
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Information Metamaterials Information science provides a way to make metamaterials be encoded, digital, programmable, software definable, and even cognitive