Abstract
We present a novel and flexible method to optimize the phase response of
reflective metasurfaces towards a desired scattering profile. The
scattering power is expressed as a spin-chain Hamiltonian using the
radar cross section formalism. For metasurfaces reflecting an oblique
plane wave, an Ising Hamiltonian is obtained. Thereby, the problem of
achieving the scattering profile is recast into finding the ground-state
solution of the associated Ising Hamiltonian. To rapidly explore the
configuration states, we encode the Ising coefficients with quantum
annealing algorithms, taking advantage of the fact that the adiabatic
evolution efficiently performs energy minimization in the Ising model.
Finally, the optimization problem is solved on the D-Wave 2048-qubit
quantum adiabatic optimizer machine for binary phase as well as
quadriphase reflective metasurfaces. Even though the work is focused on
the phase modulation of metasurfaces, we believe this approach paves the
way to fast optimization of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces that are
mod- ulated in both amplitude and phase for multi-beam generation in and
beyond 5G/6G mobile networks.