Soft Matter Metasurface for Sub‐Terahertz Near‐Field Manipulations and Wireless Communications

ABSTRACT Sub‐terahertz (THz) wireless technology is recognized for its potential to deliver terabits per second throughput and ultralow latency, reaching the sub‐microsecond level. Its extensive spectral resources enable faster and more reliable data transmissions, ultrahigh throughput short‐range communication, and innovative applications, including environmental sensing. Liquid crystal is a kind of soft material with controllable self‐assembled structures under external stimuli, offering opportunities for programmable and cost‐effective controls of sub‐THz waves. Unlike the traditional transmissive metasurfaces integrated with soft material that are constrained in control dimensions and diversity, here we propose an addressable transmissive soft matter metasurface with 24 × 24 units and low‐voltage driven (≤3.6 V). The experimental results show that the proposed meta‐atom achieves an amplitude modulation depth ( MD ) of 18.6 dB and a phase tuning range of approximately 181° at 91.7 and 97.4 GHz, respectively. The fabricated single prototype enables various near‐field wavefront engineering applications, such as amplitude‐only modulation imaging, phase‐only dynamic holography, and arbitrary‐direction non‐diffractive beam generation. Based on the prototype, we further develop a wireless communication system using the non‐diffractive beams, achieving low error vector magnitude in information transmission. The proposed metasurface opens a new pathway for near‐field wavefront management and signal enhancement in digital holography and sixth‐generation (6G) wireless communications.