Ultra-small single-negative electric metamaterials for electromagnetic coupling reduction of microstrip antenna array.

We report initially the design, fabrication and measurement of using waveguided electric metamaterials (MTM) in the design of closely-spaced microtrip antenna arrays with mutual coupling reduction. The complementary spiral ring resonators (CSRs) which exhibit single negative resonant permittivity around 3.5GHz are used as the basic electric MTM element. For verification, two CSRs with two and three concentric rings are considered, respectively. By properly arranging these well engineered waveguided MTMs between two H-plane coupled patch antennas, both numerical and measured results indicate that more than 8.4dB mutual coupling reduction is obtained. The mechanism has been studied from a physical insight. The electric MTM element is electrically small, enabling the resultant antenna array to exhibit a small separation (lambda(o)/8 at the operating wavelength) and thus a high directivity. The proposed strategy opens an avenue to new types of antenna with super performances and can be generalized for other electric resonators. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America