Mathias Fink

Greenerwave.Focus n°1 : A story of wave control by Mathias Fink - YouTube

In this talk, I will show how the research performed at Langevin Institute have led to the seminal concept behind large reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) that is currently a topic of great interest in the wireless communication community.

Starting with the first demonstrations of ultrasonic "time-reversal mirrors" focusing in complex media in the early nineties, I will underline how these ideas were first used for underwater acoustic communications and were transposed later, for electromagnetic waves, into the concept of massive MIMO for the 5G communication networks to optimize channel diversity.

Compared to these techniques that need multiple antenna array, I will explain how we proposed, nearly ten years ago, another approach using tunable binary metasurfaces to obtain with a limited number of transmitters the best communication performance. The main idea is to replace the numerous transmitting antennas, used in massive MIMO, by a smart modification of the wireless environment by physically shaping the propagation medium to achieve optimal focusing and channel diversity. Smart mirrors placed inside any wireless environment can tune the medium complexity to obtain the best communication performance.

Finally, I will also talk about how the creation of Greenerwave has opened up many other applications of these intelligent surfaces.