Exploiting Metasurfaces in Wire Antennas beyond Cloaking Applications

Many different applications of electromagnetic cloaking for wire antenna systems have been proposed in the literature in the last decades. The scattering engineering of the antenna has been made possible thanks to the use of thin and conformal metasurface wrapped around the radiating element. More recently, the cloaking functionality of the metasurface has been enriched by loading the conformal coat with electronic elements, allowing to conceive unprecedented configurations in antenna systems. Here, we aim at further expanding the degree of freedom in antenna design, by reporting new possibilities enabled by reconfigurable covering metasurface for tailoring not only the radiation and scattering characteristics of the antenna but also its electrical properties. These new potentialities introduced by metasurface coats may pave the way to a new class of wired antennas where the electrical and radiation characteristics are made reconfigurable by simply varying the covering metasurface properties.