Small-scale optical communication with tunable reflectarrays

The transition speed and repeatable cycle times of phase change materials have been significantly improved over the last decade. Inspired by this fact, we have foreseen phase change material based optical antennas and antenna arrays with attractive features of dynamic beam shaping and steering. In this paper, a tunable reflectarray is proposed to demonstrate this concept. The designed reflectarray can tune the reflected beam angle by switching between two states of phase change material.