Beam-Steering Metadevices for Intelligent Optical Wireless-Broadcasting Communications

High-performance beam-steering devices play a crucial role for optical wireless communication (OWC), which can meet the demand for increasing number of wireless mobile devices and emerging high-speed multimedia applications. Conventional beam-steering optical components like spatial light modulator and digital micromirror device are limited to realize a small steering angle (typ. several degrees), thus dramatically limits the spatial scope of OWC. Herein, a beam-steering metadevice utilizing an ultracompact metasurface assisted with a spatial light modulator is presented, which can significantly increase the beam-steering angle without at the cost of complicated optical setup like conventionally used angle magnifier. Based on the actively tunable beam-steering metadevice, an intelligent bidirectional optical broadcasting communication system is designed and experimentally demonstrated, which exhibits nine broadcasting areas covering a large field-of-view of 20 & DEG; x 20 & DEG;, with user-defined dynamic beam-steering ability in each area, and each user has a data rate of 10 Gbps for both upstream and downstream transmission. The proposed metadevices can meet the demand of intelligent optical wireless communication which requires both high-performance and low-cost for practical purpose, under currently available technical architectures.