Tong Cai

By Tong Cai, He-Xiu Xu, Guang-Ming Wang and Jian-Gang Liang

In recent years, artificial meta‐surfaces, with the advantages of smaller physical space and less losses compared with three‐dimensional (3D) metamaterials (MTM), have intrigued a great impetus and been applied widely to cloaks, subwavelength planar lenses, holograms, etc. Typically, one most important part for meta‐surfaces’ applications is to improve the performance of antennas. In this chapter, we discuss our effort in exploring novel mechanisms of enhancing the antenna bandwidth using the magneto‐electro‐dielectric waveguided meta‐surface (MED‐WG‐MS), achieving circular polarization radiation through fractal meta‐surface, and also realizing beam manipulation using cascaded resonator layers, which is demonstrated from aspects of theoretical analysis, numerical calculation, and experimental measurement. The numerical and measured results coincide well with each other. Note that all designed antenna and microwave devices based on compact meta‐surfaces show advantages compared with the conventional cases.

Part of the book: Modern Antenna Systems

By He-Xiu Xu, Guang-Ming Wang, Tong Cai, Qing Peng and Ya Qiang Zhuang

In recent years, we have witnessed a rapid expansion of using metamaterials to manipulate light or electromagnetic (EM) wave in a subwavelength scale. Specially, metamaterials have a strict limitation on element dimension from effective medium theory with respect to photonic crystals and other planar structures such as frequency selective surface (FSS). In this chapter, we review our effort in exploring physics and working mechanisms for element miniaturization along with the resulting effects on element EM response. Based on these results, we afford some guidelines on how to design and employ these compact meta-atoms in engineering functional devices with high performances. We found that some specific types of planar fractal or meandered structures are particularly suitable to achieve element miniaturization. In what follows, we review our effort in Section 1 to explore novel theory and hybrid method in designing broadband and dual band planar devices. By using single or double such compact composite right-/left-handed (CRLH) atom, we show that many microwave/RF circuits, i.e., balun, rat-race coupler, power divider and diplexer, can be further reduced while without inducing much transmission loss from two perspectives of lumped and distributed CRLH TLs. In Section 2, we show that a more compact LH atom can be engineered by combining a fractal ring and a meandered thin line. Numerical and experimental results demonstrate that a subwavelength focusing is achieved in terms of smooth outgoing field and higher imaging resolution. Section 3 is devoted to a clocking device from the new concept of superscatterer illusions. To realize the required material parameters, we propose a new mechanism by combining both electric and magnetic particles in a composite meta-atom. Such deep subwavelength particles enable exact manipulation of material parameters and thus facilitate desirable illusion performances of a proof-of-concept sample constructed by 6408 gradually varying meta-atoms. Finally, we summarize our results in the last section.

Part of the book: Metamaterials

By Haisheng Hou, Haipeng Li, Guangming Wang, Tong Cai, Xiangjun Gao and Wenlong Guo

Recently, metasurfaces (MSs) have received tremendous attention because their electromagnetic properties can be controlled at will. Generally, metasurface with hyperbolic phase distributions, namely, focusing metasurface, can be used to design high-gain antennas. Besides, metasurface has the ability of controlling the polarization state of electromagnetic wave. In this chapter, we first propose a new ultrathin broadband reflected MS and take it into application for high-gain planar antenna. Then, we propose multilayer multifunctional transmitted MSs to simultaneously enhance the gain and transform the linear polarization to circular polarization of the patch antenna. This kind of high-gain antenna eliminates the feed-block effect of the reflected ones.

Part of the book: Modern Printed-Circuit Antennas