2010 International Conference on Advances in Recent Technologies in Communication and Computing

Microwave Applications Of Metamaterials Concepts

Kirti Inamdar
Research Scholar,ECED S.V.N.I.T. Surat, Gujarat, 395007 India. kirtibajaj@gmail.com

Y.P.Kosta
Professor, ECED C.I.T., Changa Dist. Anand, Gujarat, India. ypkosta@yahoo.com

Suprava Patnaik
Associate Professor, ECED, S.V.N.I.T. Surat, Gujarat, 395007 India ssp.eced@svnit.ac.in

Abstract: The quiet waters of electromagnetism have been converted into waves by the arrival of winds from metamaterials (MM). They have appeared as a new expression in the theory of classical electromagnetics. In addition many electrical and electronics engineers have pointed out that almost all new applications arising from metamaterial concepts can be understood by using more conventional approaches, that is, without the need to invoke these metamaterial concepts. So, what is new in metamaterials? This paper introduces this new class of materials in brief; however the main objective of this paper is to discuss the applications of metamaterial at microwave frequencies. This is because these materials have opened new dimensions for rapid designing systems and sophisticated fabrication techniques even beyond microwave frequencies. Keywords: Metamaterials, Left-handed Microwave, Negative index, NRM-TL materials (LH),

fabrication issues, its advantages and disadvantages are summarized in [15]. II. STRUCTURES OF MM As MMs are artificially created ones, the difference in composition of MMs may result in a variety of structures that can be used in various environments. The most familiar MM types are 3D resonant structure MM such as split ring resonator (SRR) as shown in fig. 1 and 1D transmission line MM such as composite right and left handed MM (CRLH) as shown in fig. 3. A 2D waveguide structure (fig. 2) is also available which is suitable for waveguide environments.

I. INTRODUCTION Metamaterial- this word have become very common in the recent discussion of material research in electromagnetics and in other fields of applied and theoretical physics. The prefix meta comes from Greek and it means after or beyond. Paper by A. Shivola [1] describes the meaning of MM with the help of many definitions. The common definition of these materials is the material which exhibits both permittivity () and permeability () in negative range. Materials with negative permittivity can be found in nature. The best examples are low loss plasmas, metals and semiconductors at optical and IR frequencies. However materials with negative permeability are less common in nature due to weak magnetic interactions in most solid state materials [3]. Only in ferrimagnetic materials, the magnetic interactions are strong enough to give negative magnetic permeability. This usually occurs at microwave frequencies and that is the reason that these materials are widely used in microwave engineering. Wave propagation in media with simultaneously negative and was first discussed by Veselago [6] in 1960. However [7] gave its first demonstration nearly after 30 years. Many other popular terms associated with MMs such as backward media, LH media, Veselago media. MMs have attracted enormous attention and growth due to the demonstration of exotic effects such as negative reflective index perfect focusing and invisibility cloaking. However because of tomorrows stringent demands such as high precision and accuracy, high throughput, low competitive cost for manufacturing processes, the fabrication of MM is challenging. Various novel and current issues related to
978-0-7695-4201-0/10 $26.00 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ARTCom.2010.38 292

Fig.1 A Planar SRR geometry a) Circular b) Square. Courtesy [12].

Fig.2 A 2D Waveguided Metamaterials Courtesy[11].

Fig. 4 Arbitary coupling-level edge-coupled impedance microstrip coupled-line coupler. Courtesy[10]

B. Radiated Wave Application Various 1D and 2D Leaky-wave antennas and reflectors with unique functionalities have been designed. Fig.5 shows the examples of 1D frequency [13] and electronically scanned [14] backfire-to-endfire LW antennas.
Fig.3 A microstrip implementation of CRLH Transmission line metamaterial. Courtesy [12].

Fig 2. shows the first measurement setup for the waveguided metamaterials. The electric and magnetic response in the waveguide can be obtained in the planar structure of waveguide forming a volume inside it. The accurate implementation of the filling material into the narrow channel can be obtained by this implementation. The electromagnetic tunneling experiment is demonstrated in [2]. These backward-wave structures have been known for many decades in periodic structures. But in classical periodic structures, only space harmonics exhibit antiparallel phase and group velocities and, when including all the Fourier components, their real EM fields exhibit highly inhomogeneous distributions where diffraction dominates and refractive phenomena is prevented. In contrast, MMs behave as real materials with clearly defined constitutive parameters. MM typically consists of periodically patterned subwavelength metallic elements embedded within or on the top of a dielectric substrate, for example, Teflon and a MM. Because of their homogeneous structure many other novel and promising characteristics have been derived [9]. III. DEMONSTRATED APPLICATIONS AND CONCEPTS Of
METAMATERIALS AT MICROWAVE FREQUENCY

Fig.5(a) Frequency-scanned back-fire-to-endfire 24-cell LW antenna

A. Guided Wave Application Several guided-wave components like couplers, phase shifters, power dividers, mixers are developed using MM. Apart from this arbitrary coupling-level impedance and phase couplers, multilayer super-compact structures (i.e. super slowwave), zeroth-order resonators with constant field distribution and tight coupled-line phase or impedance couplers are also developed. [10] refers to the example of a CRLH impedance coupler, shown in Fig.4 where arbitrary coupling level is based on a new principle of even/odd modes coupling with unbalanced CRLH gaps. Coupling depends on the length of the structure which is not /2 long.

Fig.5(b) Electronically-scanned back-fire-to-endfire 30-cell LW antenna including reverse-biased varactor diodes for beem-steering.

A conventional LH LWA for microwave applications consists of a series of interdigital capacitors and shunt stubs connected with vias to the ground. Manufacturing the interdigital capacitors and meander-line inductors to operate at milli-meter wave frequencies has been very difficult because

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of etching tolerance. For milli-meter wave antennas, the value of the capacitance and inductance becomes smaller than that of the microwave antenna, so the interdigital capacitor and the shunt meander-line inductor can be replaced with a simple gap capacitor and line inductor. C. Refracted Wave Application This domain of application has been conceptual so far but with a promise to offer applications in future. Some peer papers mention the refracted-wave effects [16-18]. IV SOME OTHER APPLICATIONS of METAMATERIALS Some of the interesting applications apart from high frequency applications are discussed below: 1) Perfect Lens Curved surfaces focus light by virtue of the refractive index contrast. But no lens can focus light onto an area smaller than a square wavelength. An unconventional alternative to a lens is available. Its a parallel side slab of MM. Both the propagating and evanescent waves contribute to the resolution of the image.

In this paper, we discussed about the use of effective properties of metamaterials especially for microwave applications. Proper selection of material and its sophisticated fabrication can lead to many new prospects at such a high frequency of operation. However, many new have still to come as it can be said that the research on these materials has just started. A countless no. of applications may be envisioned for MMs and CRLH structures. But every coin has two sides. There are some challenges which remain to be met. They are related to the structural and material configuration. They are reviewed in [10]. But the time is not far when these problems will be sought out by researchers in this field. After all the promises given by MMs has to be kept!!!. R EFERENCES
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] A. Shivola, Electromagnetic Emergence In Metamaterials. Ruopeng Liu et al., Progress of Metamaterials at Microwave Frequencies, Phys. Rev. lett. 90, 2007. L.D. Landau et al., Electrodynamics of Continuous Media, Peragamon, New York,1984. J. B. Pendry, Negative Refracton makes a perfect lens, Phys. Rev.Let., vol. 85, 18, Oct 2000. Kazuo Sato, Metamaterials and Automotive Applications, R&D review of Toyota CRDL, vol. 41, no. 4, 2007. V. G. Veselago,The Electrodynamics of Substances With Simultaneously Negative Value of and , Sov. Phys. Usp, vol. 47, pp-509-514, 1968. D. R. Smith, W. J. Padilla, Composite Medium with simultaneously negative permittivity and permeability. Phys. Rev. Lett., Vol. 84, pp 4148-4187, 2007. Pekka Alitalo and Sergei Tretyakov, Electromagnetic Cloaking with Metamaterials, Materials today, vol. 12, no. 3, March 2009. C.Caloz and T. Itoh, Electromagnetis Metamaterials: Transmission line theory and Microwave Apllications, New York: Wiley. C.Caloz and T. Itoh, Metamaterials for High-Frequency Electronics, IEEE, Vol. 93, no. 10, Oct. 2005. Ruopeng Liu et al. Progress of Metamaterials at Microwave Frequencies, IEEE, 2008. Zoran Jacksic et al. Negative refractive Index Metamaterials: Principles and Applications Microwave Review, June 2006. L. Liu., C. Caloz and T. Itoh, Dominant mode LWA with backfire-toendfire scanning capability, Electron Lett., vol. 38, no. 23, pp. 14141416, Nov. 2002. S. Lim, C. Caloz and T. Itoh, Metamaterial based electronically

2) Application in Automotive
It is believed that these new types of electromagnetic components and devices would open up a new field of automotive electronics applications, such as beam scanned antenna such as beam scanned antenna for radar and mobile communications, novel magnetic materials for electric motors, the high performance absorbing and shielding materials for electromagnetic compatibility, and optical devices such as LED headlights and night vision systems using infrared cameras [5].
[7]

[8] [9] [10] [11]

3) Cloaking Effect
It means to make a device which makes the object invisible to the eye. Scientists have been thinking about these questions for a long time. Several papers are available to prove that a good amount of research work has been done in this area. An object is invisible if it does not reflect waves back to the source in addition to not to scatter them in some other direction also. In terms of the theory of scattering of electromagnetic waves(including light), to cloak an object means to reduce its total scattering cross section (SCS), ideally to zero, since the total scattering cross section is defined as the ratio of the total scattered power to the incident power density [8]
[12] [13]

[14]

controlled transmission line structure as a novel leaky wave antenna with tunable angle and beamwidth, IEEE trans., MTT, to be published.
[15] A. Bottassseva and V.M. Shalev, Fabrication of optical negative-index metamaterials: recent advances and outlook, Online, Elseviere B.V., Journal metamaterials, 2008. [16] G. V. Eleftheraides et. al.. Planar Negative refractive index media using periodically L-C loaded transmission lines, IEEE Trans MTT, vol. 50, no. 12, pp. 2702-2712, Dec. 2002. [17] A. Sanada et. al., Planar Distributed Structures With Negative Refractive Index, IEEE Trans MTT, vol. 52, no. 4, pp. 1252-1263, Apr. 2004. [18] C. Caloz and T. Itoh, Positive/Negative refractive index anisotropic 2D metamaterials, IEEE Microw. Wireless Comp. Lett., vol. 13, no. 12, pp. 547-549, Dec. 2003. [19] British Telegraph, Mobile phones: SAR ratings of popular handsets, 24 Oct. 2009. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/6416338/ Mobile phones: SAR ratings of popular handsets.html>

4) Most Recent Application

In a recent article in the British Telegraph, the BL-40 handset from LG is the first ever to utilize a MM antenna based on a proprietary RAYSPAN solution. This handset has been declared to be the phone with lowest Specific Absorption Ratio (SAR) as compared with the other popular one of the same company [19]. V C ONCLUSION

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