Cover story: Zeng C, Lu H, Mao D, Du YQ, Hua H et al. Graphene-empowered dynamic metasurfaces and metadevices. Opto-Electron Adv 5, 200098 (2022).

The static metasurfaces and metadevices have been researched extensively in past decade. However, their functionalities cannot be actively tuned in situ after fabrication, which seriously impedes their application scenarios such as varifocal lens, dynamic holography, and beam steering in LiDAR. Due to the intrinsic advantages of compact footprint, remarkable electrical tunability, broadband and high-speed operation, graphene has been successively demonstrated as a favorable candidate to empower metasurfaces with remarkable dynamic tunability. Currently, the related advances are propelling the electromagnetic (EM) wave manipulations to a new height: from static to dynamic. Recently, the teams from Professor Wei Zhao at Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Professor Jianlin Zhao at Northwestern Polytechnical University reported a comprehensive review on dynamic metasurfaces and metadevices enabled by graphene with the focus on the electrically-controlled dynamic manipulation of the EM waves from the mid-infrared and terahertz to microwave regimes. In this Review, graphene-empowered dynamic metasurfaces and metadevices are divided into two categories, i.e., metasurfaces with building blocks of structured graphene and hybrid metasurfaces integrated with graphene. The state-of-the-art developments on dynamic spectrum manipulation, wavefront shaping, polarization control, and frequency conversion are highly elaborated in near/far fields and global/local ways, respectively. At the end, the remaining challenges and the potential future developments are outlined and analyzed. They believe that the dynamic metasurfaces and metadevices using graphene and further graphene-like 2D materials will certainly revolutionize the EM wave manipulations and finally the commercialized applications in the future.