Enhancing performance and versatility of wire antennas with metasurface covers

With the ever-growing demand for enhanced performance and adaptability in communication systems, several innovative approaches to improve antenna technology have been developed. Among these, metasurfaces have emerged as a key enabling technology due to their ability to achieve a precise control over electromagnetic wave propagation [1]. Recent advances in this field have yielded metasurface covers capable of seamless integration with wire antennas and enabling unprecedented control over radiation and scattering patterns, received power, and impedance-matching [2-7]. For instance, extensive research efforts have been put in the framework the design of cover able suppressing the scattering level of an antenna source, enabling novel degrees of freedom in the design of overcrowded telecommunication platforms [2]. More recently, it has been also shown how the use of bianisotropic metasurface cloak - such as the one shown in Fig. 1(b) - may break the reciprocal behavior of conventional antennas and allow designing a radiating system with almost zero scattering and high transmission efficiency [6]-[7]. This versatility extends also to the realization of reconfigurable and tunable wire antennas (such as the one shown in Fig. 1(a)), capable of adapting their radiation, frequency of operation or polarization characteristics to the evolving requirements of the communication system [4,5].