Breaking the Trade‐off: Single‐Element Metagratings for Multibeam Wavefront Engineering

ABSTRACT Metagratings have emerged as a powerful platform for efficient electromagnetic wave control. Fundamentally, a trade‐off exists between architectural complexity and functional diversity: a single meta‐atom per period can only suppress one diffraction order, typically enabling anomalous reflection and dual‐beam splitting in the case of two and three propagating orders, respectively. Achieving control over more diffraction modes necessitates introducing additional meta‐atoms within the per