China has created a new artificial surface that is capable of bending and focus electromagnetic waves like an antenna.

Researchers were able to create the new surface by depositing a collection of small, metallic, U-shaped structures onto a dielectric material, according to a recent news release.

The discovery could lead to the creation of new types of antennas that are flat, conformal to the shape of curved surfaces, or ultra-low-profile.

The researchers are calling the breakthrough the first broadband transformation optics metasurface lens, according to the news release.

The lens was described in AIP Publishing's journal Applied Physics Letters. Research was conducted by Tie Jun Cui and colleagues from Southeast University in Nanjing, China.

Luneburg lenses are usually spherical optics that interact with light in an uncommon way.

Most lenses are composed of a single material like glass or plastic, which bends light passing through in "a consistent, characteristic way a key characteristic of the material," which is called its "index of refraction," according to the release.

"A Luneburg lens has the unusual property of bending light more or less depending on where the light strikes the lens," said the release. "This is because in a Luneburg lens, the index of refraction varies across the spherical lens body, making it very different than a normal lens."

A number of materials, like glass for example, have a higher index refraction and bend light more than others.

Luneburg lenses are capable of focusing light or incoming electromagnetic waves to an off-axis point at the edge of the lens.

"We now have three systematical designing methods to manipulate the surface waves with inhomogeneous metasurfaces, the geometric optics, holographic optics, and transformation optics," Cui said. "These technologies can be combined to exploit more complicated applications."

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