Reconfigurable flexible metasurfaces: from fundamentals towards biomedical applications

Abstract Metamaterials and metasurfaces of artificial micro-/nano- structures functioning from microwave, terahertz, to infrared regime have enabled numerous applications from bioimaging, cancer detection and immunoassay to on-body health monitoring systems in the past few decades. Recently, the trend of turning metasurface devices flexible and stretchable has arisen in that the flexibility and stretchability not only makes the device more biocompatible and wearable, but also provides unique control and manipulation of the structural and geometrical reconfiguration of the metasurface in a creative manner, resulting in an extraordinary tunability for biomedical sensing and detection purposes. In this Review, we summarize recent advances in the design and fabrication techniques of stretchable reconfigurable metasurfaces and their applications to date thereof, and put forward a perspective for future development of stretchable reconfigurable metamaterials and metasurfaces.