Reflective Intelligent Surfaces: Enabling Reconfigurability with Composite Vortices

Enabling the reconfigurability of Reflective Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) is a challenging task that needs to be addressed for their full exploitation in a smart electromagnetic environment. Although different practical solutions have been proposed, they typically involve complex control systems, affecting the cost to produce, deploy, and operate RISs. As an alternative solution, we discuss the possibility of exploiting the topological properties of vortex modes for controlling in real-time the RIS response, allowing for a simpler practical implementation.