An Information Science View of Metamaterials

In the past decade, metamaterials and metasurfaces have been widely investigated to control electromagnetic waves. Previous studies of metamaterials, however, have been based on effective medium parameters, with the basic artificial structures characterized by continuous values. Inspired by information science, we have proposed a concept of “coding metamaterials,” in which the metamaterial particles are assigned distinct binary “0” and “1” codes denoting opposite phases. We have shown that coding metamaterials can manipulate scattering beams at will and can generate broadband diffusion of terahertz (THz) waves using Minkovski fractal coding particles.