Kirigami-Inspired Planar Deformable Metamaterials for Multiple Dynamic Electromagnetic Manipulations

The Kirigami technique has recently inspired the design of reconfigurable electromagnetic metamaterials that can be easily realized by embedding a patterned cutting array into a supportive substrate. However, these existing designs mainly focus on the 2D-to-3D transformable morphology that induces the modulation of the spectral responses. This work proposes a kirigami-based planar reconfiguration mechanism and extends advanced applications in the dynamic near-field imaging and tunable double-foci metalens. These extraordinary tunabilities originate from three meta-atoms that can be mutually transformed into the morphologies with non-chirality and opposite chirality under the tensile strain. By utilizing the transmittance characteristics of reconfigurable meta-atoms, the metamaterial is constructed to achieve three-foldable near-field displays and a longitudinal double-foci metalens empowered with tunable focusing length and intensity ratio. Two anisotropic chiral meta-atoms in deformed states that possess overwhelming transmittance difference of circularly cross-polarized components to magnify the focusing intensity ratio of two foci for the proposed metalens are further proposed. The exhibited observations provide typical examples of a wide spectrum of applications of the kirigami-based reconfiguration mechanism, and it may pave the avenue to spark manifold functional devices for applicable electromagnetic manipulations such as multifunctional hologram display, dynamic beam shaping, and steering, as well as the conformal design of meta-devices.