HIGH GAIN SLOTTED WAVEGUIDE ANTENNA BASED ON BEAM FOCUSING USING ELECTRICALLY SPLIT RING RESONATOR METASURFACE EMPLOYING NEGATIVE REFRACTIVE INDEX MEDIUM

In this paper, a new high performance slotted waveguide antenna incorporated with negative refractive index metamaterial structure is proposed, designed and experimentally demonstrated. The metamaterial structure is constructed from a multilayer two-directional structure of electrically split ring resonator which exhibits negative refractive index in direction of the radiated wave propagation when it is placed in front of the slotted waveguide antenna. As a result, the radiation beams of the slotted waveguide antenna are focused in both E and H planes, and hence the directivity and the gain are improved, while the beam area is reduced. The proposed antenna and the metamaterial structure operating at 10 GHz are designed, optimized and numerically simulated by using CST software. The effective parameters of the eSRR structure are extracted by Nicolson Ross Weir (NRW) algorithm from the s-parameters. For experimental verification, a proposed antenna operating at 10 GHz is fabricated using both wet etching microwave integrated circuit technique (for the metamaterial structure) and milling technique (for the slotted waveguide antenna). The measurements are carried out in an anechoic chamber. The measured results show that the E plane gain of the proposed slotted waveguide antenna is improved from 6.5 dB to 11 dB as compared to the conventional slotted waveguide antenna. Also, the E plane beamwidth is reduced from 94.1 degrees to about 50 degrees. The antenna return loss and bandwidth are slightly changed. Furthermore, the proposed antenna offered easier fabrication processes with a high gain than the horn antenna, particularly if the proposed antenna is scaled down in dimensionality to work in the THz regime.