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
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
Recently, metasurfaces (MSs) have continuously drawn significant attentions in the area of enhancing the performances of the conventional antennas. Thereinto, focusing MSs with hyperbolic phase distributions can be used for designing high-gain antennas. In this chapter, we first design a new reflected MS and use a spiral antenna as the feeding source to achieve a wideband high-gain antenna. On this basis, we propose a bi-layer reflected MS to simultaneously enhance the gain and transform the linear polarization to circular polarization of the Vivaldi antenna. Then, we proposed a multilayer transmitted MS and use it to enhance the gain of a patch antenna. This kind of high-gain antenna eliminates the feed-block effect of the reflected ones but suffer from multilayer fabrication. To conquer this problem, we finally propose a single-layer transmitted focusing MS by grouping two different kinds of elements and use it to successfully design a low-profile high-gain antenna.
Part of the book: Metamaterials and Metasurfaces
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
Fabry-Pérot cavity (FPC) antenna is a kind of high-gain antenna. Compared with other high-gain antennas, such as array antenna and reflector antenna, the FPC antenna enjoys the advantages of simple structure and high efficiency. So it has attracts many attention since proposed. However, it also suffers the disadvantages of narrow band and fixed radiation patterns, due to its resonance structure. In order to overcome these disadvantages, we proposed novel strategies to realize reconfigurable FPC antennas using the phase controllable metasurfaces (MSs). Through adding PIN diodes into every unit cell of the MS, the reflection phase of the MS can be controlled by tuning the states of the diodes. Then the designed phase controllable MSs are used as the partially reflection surfaces (PRS) to realize frequency or radiation pattern reconfigurable FPC antennas. In this chapter, we analyze the basic theory of the FPC antenna and describe its radiation principle firstly. Then, reflection phase controllable MSs are designed and applied to the FPC antennas. Thus frequency and radiation pattern reconfigurable FPC antennas are formed. The design processes are described in details, and the proposed antennas are fabricated and measured. The measured results verify the correctness of the designs. Through this chapter, the readers can form a comprehensive understanding of reconfigurable FPC antenna design.
Part of the book: Advanced Radio Frequency Antennas for Modern Communication and Medical Systems