Fig. 3: Experimental demonstration of the reconfigurable metasurface as a beam flipper.

a–c Schematics of the beam flipper exhibiting different beam bending effect in 1-3 plane in undeployed ( β = 0°), intermediate ( β = 22.5°) and deployed states ( β = 45°), respectively. Here, the geometric phase profiles carried by the devices for LCP illumination case are denoted by the color mapped on the meta-atoms, which satisfy the linear, binary and inversely linear distributions along r direction in the three states. The yellow and blue arrows represent the incident LP beam and the anomalous reflection CP beam, respectively. d–f Optical photographs of the fabricated beam flipper in the three states. Color mapped on each photograph indicates the encoded geometric phase distribution for the devices. Scale bar, 30 mm. g–i (i) Experimentally measured electric field intensity distributions of reflection beam with RCP at 16 GHz and (ii) within the frequency range of 12–17 GHz for the metasurface in three states. The field intensities at different angles are normalized against a reference signal, which is the received electric field intensity at \({\theta }_{{{{\rm{r}}}}}={0}{^{\circ }}\) when the same incident beam is reflected by a flat metal with the same size of the metasurface sample. Here, the dashed line represents the theoretical prediction of the anomalous reflection angle. These results demonstrate the reconfigurable beam bending effects, including the single-beam anomalous reflection, dual-beam anomalous reflection as well as flipped single-beam anomalous reflection, based on the RS kirigami transformation. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.