Broadband and wide-angle plane focal surface Luneburg lens

Abstract

The energy crisis has aroused widespread concern, and the reform of energy structure is imminent. In the future, the energy structure will be dominated by the solar energy and other renewable energy sources. The solar concentrating technology as a promising method has been widely studied for collecting solar energy. However, the previous solar concentrating technologies suffer from some drawbacks, such as low focusing efficiency and large concentrating size. The Luneburg lens with highly efficient aberration-free focusing provides a new route for solar/energy concentrator. In this work, we designed a plane focal surface Luneburg lens (PFSLL) by transformation optics (TO). The PFSLL provides a relatively high focusing efficiency and concentration ratio of collection of energy. At the same time, it circumvents the disadvantage of curve surface of the classical Luneburg lens in device integration. Based on the reciprocity of electromagnetic waves, the PFSLL can also be applied to the antenna field to achieve broadband wide-angle scanning and highly directional radiation.