The 2026 roadmap on wireless and microwave metasurfaces

Microwave and wireless metasurfaces are transitioning from specialist electromagnetic structures to enabling technologies with growing impact across telecommunications, sensing, healthcare, and defence. This roadmap provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of research on microwave and wireless metasurfaces in the UK, highlighting recent advances and the key challenges that must be addressed to enable widespread deployment. Contributions from academia, industry, and government laboratories are organised around three cross-cutting themes: application-driven developments, emerging fundamental science, and practical considerations related to manufacture, integration, and scalability. The roadmap reviews progress in areas including reconfigurable intelligent surfaces for 5G and beyond-5G communications, enhanced radio coverage and sensing in wireless and healthcare settings, terahertz metasurfaces for beam manipulation, radar cross-section control, bioelectronic applications, and flexible and conformal metasurface platforms. Across these domains, recurring challenges are identified, such as bandwidth and angular limitations, reconfigurability with low loss and low power consumption, robustness to manufacturing tolerances, system-level integration, and long-term reliability. Emerging solutions are discussed, including machine learning-assisted design, advanced and additive manufacturing techniques, new functional materials, and hybrid electronic, optical, and mechanical control strategies. By synthesising perspectives across multiple sectors, this roadmap provides a clear snapshot of the current research landscape while outlining priority directions for future work, with the aim of supporting researchers, industry stakeholders, and policymakers in accelerating the translation of microwave and wireless metasurfaces from laboratory demonstrations to reliable, scalable technologies with real-world impact.