Deep-Learning-Empowered Inverse Design for Freeform Reconfigurable Metasurfaces

The past decade has witnessed the advances of artificial intelligence with various applications in engineering. Recently, artificial neural network empowered inverse design for metasurfaces has been developed that can design on-demand meta-atoms with diverse shapes and high performance, where the design process based on artificial intelligence is fast and automatic. However, once the inverse-designed static meta-atom is fabricated, the function of the metasurface is fixed. Reconfigurable metasurfaces can realize dynamic functions, while applying artificial intelligence to design practical reconfigurable meta-atoms inversely has not been reported yet. Here, we present a deep-learning-empowered inverse design method for freeform reconfigurable metasurfaces, which can generate on-demand reconfigurable coding meta-atoms at self-defined frequency bands. To reduce the scale of dataset, a decoupling method of the reconfigurable meta-atom based on microwave network theory is proposed at first, which can convert the inverse design process for reconfigurable coding meta-atoms to the inverse design for static structures. A convolutional neural network model is trained to predict the responses of free-shaped meta-atoms, and the genetic algorithm is applied to generate the optimal structure patterns rapidly. As a demonstration of concept, several inverse-designed examples are generated with different self-defined spectrum responses in microwave band, and an inverse-designed wideband reconfigurable metasurface prototype is fabricated and measured for beam scanning applications with broad bandwidth. Our work paves the way for the fast and automatic design process of high-performance reconfigurable metasurfaces.