Analytical modeling of time-varying and dispersive metasurfaces with surface susceptibility operators

Abstract

With the advent of new fabrication technologies, time-varying metasurfaces have emerged as novel platforms for exotic waveform shaping in microwaves and optics, providing an additional degree of freedom to design dynamically controllable and reconfigurable scatterers. Nevertheless, inherent structural properties and material dispersion significantly complicate the computational analysis of such time-varying structures, highlighting the importance of efficient and intuitive analytical approaches that are generalizable to a wide class of meta-atom topologies and temporal modulation profiles. In this work, surface susceptibilities under generalized sheet transition conditions (GSTCs), widely used to model metasurfaces, are extended to a compact and tractable operator form for the frequency-domain analysis of metasurfaces with arbitrary temporal modulation and material dispersion. By virtue of this formalism, we derive the time-variant versions of simple surface susceptibility formulas for periodic arrays of freestanding and substrated dipolar scatterers through the use of appropriate polarizabilities. The applicability of the proposed approach to the characterization of reflective and transmissive properties of pulsed and Floquet metasurfaces is demonstrated and verified against full-wave simulations.