Metasurface Antennas: New Models, Applications and Realizations

TLDR

The paper introduces novel metasurface antenna designs, detailing their implementation and experimental validation. The antennas use subwavelength elements on a grounded dielectric slab, exploiting cylindrical surface‑wave interaction with an anisotropic impedance boundary to generate arbitrary aperture fields, and are tuned via printed‑element shaping for beam shape, bandwidth, and polarization control. Experimentally, the antennas achieved up to 70 % aperture efficiency, 30 % bandwidth, and simultaneously produced high‑gain dual‑frequency beams with unprecedented performance.

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents new designs, implementation and experiments of metasurface (MTS) antennas constituted by subwavelength elements printed on a grounded dielectric slab. These antennas exploit the interaction between a cylindrical surface wave (SW) wavefront and an anisotropic impedance boundary condition (BC) to produce an almost arbitrary aperture field. They are extremely thin and excited by a simple in-plane monopole. By tailoring the BC through the shaping of the printed elements, these antennas can be largely customized in terms of beam shape, bandwidth and polarization. In this paper, we describe new designs and their implementation and measurements. It is experimentally shown for the first time that these antennas can have aperture efficiency up to 70%, a bandwidth up to 30%, they can produce two different direction beams of high-gain and similar beams at two different frequencies, showing performances never reached before.