Stacked Fluid Metasurfaces: Mutual-Coupling-Aware Modeling and Optimization

Abstract

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces process the transmitted field layer by layer, and fluid antennas make the position of every radiator a design variable. Combined, they pack radiators at sub-wavelength spacings within and across layers, where mutual coupling governs the physics that current models omit. This paper develops a coupling-consistent model of a fluid transmit layer illuminating a stack of passive fluid beyond-diagonal layers. The multiport impedance matrix of any port constellation is shown to be the impedance kernel sampled at the three-dimensional separations, in one closed spherical-Hankel form whose in-plane restriction is intra-layer coupling and whose axial restriction replaces the scalar Rayleigh--Sommerfeld propagator. Only the transmitter is driven: the layer currents are induced, and the familiar cascade is the single-pass limit of one matrix inversion. In the wavenumber domain the light circle still separates radiation from reaction, now with a plane-wave propagator attached, every Fourier mode sees a transmission line loaded by the layers, and an efficiency identity shows that what the stack costs in efficiency is set by its total induced-current norm, not by its layer count. Because the load is never assumed layer-diagonal, interconnections may join atoms on different sheets, and vertical networks repeated at every site are spectrally local. Alternating optimization designs precoders, positions, and loads with closed-form gradients. Numerically, fluid ports on a $λ/8$ grid perform within a few per cent of continuously movable ones, while a design based on the conventional cascade model can do worse than open-circuiting the stack.