Polarization state of electromagnetic wave has important applications in satellite communication, radar detection, and stereoscopic display imaging. Therefore, the control of polarization state of electromagnetic wave is an important direction in scientific research. The traditional method of manipulating the polarization state is mainly realized based on Faraday effect and birefringent crystal, which has a certain requirement for the material thickness (leading to large volume), and does not have broadband characteristics (leading to narrow band). Recently, metamaterial with subwavelength meta-atoms, has achieved many exotic phenomena and functionalities that cannot be found in nature. As an important branch of metamaterial-based devices, polarization converter has attracted great attention and achieved significant progress. However, most of them cannot realize ultra-broadband, high-efficiency, wide-angle, and simple geometry simultaneously.

In this paper, a linear polarization converter based on a square split ring metasurface is proposed. Due to the anisotropic structure, the amplitudes of the reflected electric field along the two diagonal lines are equal, and their phase difference is 180°. As a result, the polarization direction of the incident wave can be rotated 90°. The simulation results show that the polarization conversion ratio (PCR) is higher than 90% in a frequency range from 7.12 to 18.82 GHz, which means that the relative bandwidth reaches 90%. The significant bandwidth expansion is attributed to the four electromagnetic resonances generated in a square-split-ring unit. We investigate the influence of geometric parameters on PCR in detail. We also examine the performance of the proposed structure under oblique incidence. It has little effect on the co-polarization and cross-polarization reflection coefficients when the incident angle is changed from 0° to 45°. Even if the incident angle reaches 45°, the mean PCR remains above 80%. The PCRs of the four electromagnetic resonant points are all close to 100%. Finally, we fabricate and measure the proposed polarization converter that contains 30\times30 unit cells. The experimental results are in good agreement with the simulation results, and thus validating the design.

In conclusion, we propose both theoretically and experimentally a linear polarization converter that possesses ultra-broadband, high-efficiency, wide-angle, and simple geometry simultaneously. The proposed scheme can be extended to terahertz and even optical frequencies.