Microwave Metamaterial Antennas and Other Applications

Authors: Tie Jun Cui and Hui Feng Ma

Source: FERMAT, Volume 11, Communications 7, Sep_Oct, 2015


Abstract: Metamaterials have attracted great attentions due to their ability to control electromagnetic waves and the unusual properties. This presentation will be focused on the application of metamaterials in microwave antennas and other devices, exploring better performance and/or new features. Three types of metamaterial antennas are presented: zero-index material antennas, small patch antennas for wireless communications, and metamaterial lens antennas.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate two kinds of anisotropic zero-index materials (AZIMs) in the Cartesian and cylindrical coordinates, respectively. The Cartesian AZIMs (such as z component of permittivity or permeability tensor equals zero) are shown to generate perfectly plane waves in the z direction, resulting in high-directivity antennas. We make two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) experiments to verify such new features. On the contrary, the radially AZIMs (radial component of permittivity or permeability tensor in the cylindrical coordinate equals zero) will always produce omnidirectional radiations regardless the numbers and positions of sources inside AZIM. We also show experimentally the powerful ability of AZIM to reach high-efficiency spatial power combination for the omnidirectional radiations.

Index Terms: Background and Motivation, Small Metamaterial Antennas, Anisotropic Zero-Index Material Antennas, Metamaterial Lens Antennas, Other applications, Summary


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Microwave Metamaterial Antennas and Other Applications