Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)
1558-2221
abstract
In this article, we propose a novel glide-symmetric metallic holey unit cell loaded with a coaxial pin and investigate the propagation properties when embedded into parallel-plate waveguides. We demonstrate that the introduction of coaxial loading on the holey unit cell increases the effective refractive index and, together with glide-symmetry, greatly improves the isotropic properties compared to glide-symmetric holey structures. These two properties are desirable when designing graded-index lens antennas. To demonstrate the potential of the new coaxial unit cell, a fully metallic Mikaelian lens antenna is designed and manufactured using the CNC milling technique. The antenna works in the X-band and produces a directive fan beam that can be steered ±30° across the H-plane while keeping the scan loss and sidelobe levels acceptably low. The measured results of the antenna are in good agreement with the simulations.
Classification
subjects
Telecommunications
keywords
isotropic unit cell; metalens antenna; metallic metasurface; mikaelian lens.