PULSE · Plasma reconfigurable metasurface technologies

PULSE pursues the ambitious goal of defining a new technological horizon for implementing reconfigurable electromagnetic devices by unifying the research domains of metasurfaces with the plasma physics. The advantages retuned by plasma when combined with metasurfaces are multiple: first, plasma allows overcoming the main limitations of conventional reconfigurability strategies and achieving unprecedented tunability rate at high frequencies. Additionally, plasma enables conceptually new scenarios in which the individual properties of the meta-atoms, and even their shape/size, can be time-modulated. The project, thus, is aimed to fully merging two different research fields for establishing a radically new technology (plasma metadevices) offering unprecedented possibilities. To address this vision, several science-to-technology breakthroughs are proposed, including tunable lenses for antennas, non-reciprocal devices in waveguide technology and four-dimensional (4D) devices, in which the variation of the shape over the time becomes an additional degree of freedom to achieve new effects at the fundamental level. PULSE's technological goals are beyond the state-of-the-art and outside any scientific and technological roadmap of the involved scientific communities. In addition, it is expected that PULSE will also have a dramatic economic and society impact. The unprecedented functionalities of the plasma-based metadevices, in fact, can address the increasingly stringent requirements of the next-generation telecommunication systems. To achieve PULSE's ambitious scopes, the Consortium has been built for success in terms of industry and academic excellence. We have brought together a Consortium with a true European dimension, with eigth beneficiaries from Italy, Spain, Finland, Greece and Belgium. Our expertise is interdisciplinary, complementary and characterized by appropriateness of equipment in all the involved scientific and technological domains.