Shared aperture metasurface antenna for electromagnetic vortices generation with different topological charges

Vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) have aroused great interest of both scientific and engineering communities. Encouragingly, generating OAM with different topological charges in a shared aperture is regarded as a potential route to expanding the communication capacity, which yet is an academic challenging task. In this work, a paradigm of designing metasurface-based shared aperture antenna for generating polarization-dependent vortex beams with distinct topological charges is proposed. Anisotropic unit cells that can tailor different resonance phase profiles in two orthogonal orientations are used to assemble a metasurface reflector. As a proof-of-concept, a planar reflector antenna is designed with two Vivaldi sources, which can generate x- and y-polarized vortex beams with topological charges of l=-1 and l=-2, respectively. Both the simulation results and the measurement results are in good agreement, which demonstrates the feasibility of our design. Significantly, this work provides a new route to achieving vortex beams carrying different topological charges in the same frequency band, which may have potential applications in communication systems.