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1. Fully 3D-Printed mm-Wave Wide-Angle 1D Beam-Steering Antenna Using Zigzagged Lens Antenna Subarrays With Curved Focal Surfaces

   https://doi.org/10.1109/OJAP.2025.3592898  

   Jebreil, Omar; Liu, Ruoke; Mumcu, Gökhan (October 2025, IEEE Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation)

   This paper presents a fully 3D-printed wideband mm-wave beam-steering antenna concept capable of performing wide-angle electronic beam-steering by making use of zigzagged lens antenna subarrays (LASs) with curved focal surfaces. The concept is demonstrated through the design and realization of a 38 GHz antenna consisting of L=4 dielectric slab waveguide (DSW) lenses each fed with structurally embedded M=6 TEM horn antennas, which can effectively reduce the required number of phase shifters (PSs) from N=M×L=24 to L=4 . It is demonstrated that the joint utilization of zigzagged LAS and curved focal surfaces with structurally integrated TEM horn antennas, all enabled through the design flexibilities offered by the emerging additive manufacturing (AM) technology, improves the realized gain, side lobe level (SLL), and beam-steering range in comparison to the earlier versions realized with planar focal surfaces. Specifically, the antenna exhibits a simulated realized gain of 16.5 dBi with an H-plane beam-steering range exceeding ±45° and a half-power beamwidth (HPBW) of 4.5° while maintaining an SLL below –9.3 dB across the entirety of the scan range. Measurements taken with the manufactured antenna prototype show excellent agreement with the performance obtained from full-wave simulations. 

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2. Beam steering at the nanosecond time scale with an atomically thin reflector

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29976-0  

   Andersen, Trond I.; Gelly, Ryan J.; Scuri, Giovanni; Dwyer, Bo L.; Wild, Dominik S.; Bekenstein, Rivka; Sushko, Andrey; Sung, Jiho; Zhou, You; Zibrov, Alexander A.; et al (June 2022, Nature Communications)

   Abstract Techniques to mold the flow of light on subwavelength scales enable fundamentally new optical systems and device applications. The realization of programmable, active optical systems with fast, tunable components is among the outstanding challenges in the field. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a few-pixel beam steering device based on electrostatic gate control of excitons in an atomically thin semiconductor with strong light-matter interactions. By combining the high reflectivity of a MoSe₂monolayer with a graphene split-gate geometry, we shape the wavefront phase profile to achieve continuously tunable beam deflection with a range of 10°, two-dimensional beam steering, and switching times down to 1.6 nanoseconds. Our approach opens the door for a new class of atomically thin optical systems, such as rapidly switchable beam arrays and quantum metasurfaces operating at their fundamental thickness limit. 

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3. Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Design for Enhanced Beam Steering in Communication Systems

   https://doi.org/10.23919/INC-USNC-URSI61303.2024.10632285  

   Islam, T; Eroglu, A; Jones, M; Henao, M; Hackenbruch, C; Xie, Z (July 2024, IEEE)

   This paper presents a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) design and simulation aimed at enhancing beamforming and beam steering capabilities for 5G and 6G mobile communications. The proposed design introduces a 2- bit unit cell design, having four distinct phase states that can be tuned by a single varactor diode. This configuration has a 5x5 array and provides efficient operation at 23.8 GHz within the 5G New Radio (NR) frequency range 2 (FR2). The proposed RIS design demonstrates unique beam steering capabilities ranging from −60∘ to 60∘ in the azimuth plane which is crucial for extending coverage into the mm-wave coverage. The performance of the RIS is simulated using the CST 3D electromagnetic simulator, focusing on radar cross section (RCS) pattern for optimization. The simulation results reveal effective beam steering capabilities ranging from -10° to -60° and 10° to 60°, with a minimum scan loss of approximately 3 dB. The proposed RIS exhibits the high angular reciprocity that handles the incident waves up to 110∘ at an oblique 60∘ angle. 

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4. Liquid-crystal-based visible-light integrated optical phased arrays and application to underwater communications

   https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.494387  

   Notaros, Milica; DeSantis, Daniel_M; Raval, Manan; Notaros, Jelena (October 2023, Optics Letters)

   In this Letter, we present the first, to the best of our knowledge, liquid-crystal-based integrated optical phased arrays (OPAs) that enable visible-light beam forming and steering. A cascaded OPA architecture is developed and experimentally shown to emit a beam in the far field at a 632.8-nm wavelength with a power full width at half maximum of 0.4°×1.6° and 7.2° beam-steering range within ±3.4 V. Furthermore, we show the first visible-light integrated-OPA-based free-space-optical-communications transmitter and use it to demonstrate the first integrated-OPA-based underwater-wireless-optical-communications link. We experimentally demonstrate a 1-Gbps on–off-keying link through water and an electronically-switchable point-to-multipoint link with channel selectivity greater than 19 dB through a water-filled tank. 

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5. Vernier optical phased array lidar transceivers

   https://doi.org/10.1364/OE.451578  

   Dostart, Nathan; Zhang, Bohan; Brand, Michael; Al_Qubaisi, Kenaish; Onural, Deniz; Feldkhun, Daniel; Popović, Miloš; Wagner, Kelvin (June 2022, Optics Express)

   Optical phased arrays (OPAs) which beam-steer in two dimensions (2D) are currently limited to grating row spacings well above a half wavelength. This gives rise to grating lobes along one axis which limit the field of view (FOV), introduce return signal ambiguity, and reduce the optical efficiency in lidar applications. We demonstrate a Vernier transceiver scheme which uses paired transmit and receive phased arrays with different row periodicities, leading to mismatched grating lobe angular spacings and only a single aligned pair of transmit and receive lobes. This permits a return signal from a target in the desired lobe to be efficiently coupled back into the receive OPA while back-scatter from the other grating lobes is rejected, removing the ambiguity. Our proposal goes beyond previously considered Vernier schemes in other domains like RF and sound, to enable adynamic Vernierwhere all beam directions are simultaneously Vernier aligned, and allow ultra-fast scanning, or multi-beam, operation with Vernier lobe suppression. We analyze two variants of grating lobe suppressing beam-steering configurations, one of which eliminates the FOV limitation, and find the conditions for optimal lobe suppression. We present the first, to the best of our knowledge, experimental demonstration of an OPA Vernier transceiver, including grating lobe suppression of 6.4 dB and beam steering across 5.5°. The demonstration is based on a pair of 2D-wavelength-steered serpentine OPAs. These results address the pervasive issue of grating lobes in integrated photonic lidar schemes, opening the way to larger FOVs and reduced complexity 2D beam-steering designs. 

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