We propose microwave heating via electromagnetic coupling using zeroth-order resonators (ZORs) to extend the uniform heating area. ZORs can generate resonant modes with a wavenumber of 0, which corresponds to an infinite guide wavelength. Under this condition, uniform heating is expected because the resulting standing waves would not have nodes or antinodes. In the design proposed in this paper, two ZORs fabricated on dielectric substrates are arranged to face each other for electromagnetic coupling, and a sample placed between the resonators is heated. A single ZOR was investigated using a 3D electromagnetic simulator, and the resonant frequency and electric field distribution of the simulated ZOR were confirmed to be in good agreement with those of the fabricated ZOR. Simulations of two ZORs facing each other were then conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system as a heating apparatus. It was found that a resonator spacing of 25 mm was suitable for uniform heating. Heating simulations of SiC and Al2O3 sheets were performed with the obtained structure. The heating uniformity was evaluated by the width L50% over which the power loss distribution exceeds half the maximum value. This evaluation index was equal to 0.397λ0 for SiC and 0.409λ0 for Al2O3, both of which exceed λ0/4, the distance between a neighboring node and antinode of a standing wave, where λ0 is the free-space wavelength. Therefore, the proposed heating apparatus is effective for uniform microwave heating. Because of the different electrical parameters of the heated materials, SiC can be easily heated, whereas Al2O3 heats little. Finally, heating experiments were performed on each of these materials. Good uniformity in temperature was obtained for both SiC and Al2O3 sheets.

Extremely compact harmonic tuning circuits for class-F amplifiers are realized using composite right-/left-handed (CRLH) transmission line stubs. The proposed circuits take up only a small fraction of the amplifier circuit area and yet are capable of treating four harmonics up to the 5th with a single stub or double stub configuration. This has become possible by using the negative order resonance modes of the CRLH TL, allowing for flexible and simultaneous control of many harmonics by engineering the dispersion relation of the stub line. The CRLH harmonic tuning stubs for 2-GHz amplifiers were realized using surface mounting chip capacitors, whereas the stub for 4-GHz amplifiers was fabricated based fully on microstrip-line technology. The fabricated 2-GHz and 4-GHz GaN HEMT class-F amplifiers exhibited peak drain efficiency and peak PAE of more than 83% and 74%, respectively.

This paper describes the equivalent-circuit model of a metamaterial composed of conducting spheres and wires. This model involves electromagnetic coupling between the conductors, with retardation. The lumped-parameter equivalent circuit, which imports retardation to the electromagnetic coupling, is developed in this paper from Maxwell's equation. Using the equivalent-circuit model, we clarify the relationship between the retardation and radiation loss; we theoretically demonstrate that the electromagnetic retardation in the near-field represents the radiation loss of the meta-atom in the far-field. Furthermore, this paper focuses on the retarded electromagnetic coupling between two meta-atoms; we estimate the changes in the resonant frequencies and the losses due to the distance between the two coupled meta-atoms. It is established that the dependence characteristics are significantly affected by electromagnetic retardation.

This paper describes a novel composite right-/left-handed (CRLH) transmission line (TL) stub resonator for X-band low phase-noise oscillator application. The bandpass filter type resonator composed only of microstrip components exhibits unloaded-Q exceeding that of microstrip-line resonators by engineering the dispersion relation for the CRLH TL. Two different types of stub resonator using identical and non-identical unit-cells are compared. Although the latter type was found to be superior to the former in terms of spurious frequency responses and the circuit size, care was taken to prevent the parasitic inductances distributed in the interdigital capacitors from impeding the Q-factor control capability of the resonator. The stub resonator thus optimized was applied to an 8.8-GHz SiGe HBT oscillator, which achieved a phase-noise of -134dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset despite the modest dielectric loss tangent of the PCB laminate used as the substrate of the circuit.

Novel design approaches for microwave active circuits using composite right-/left-handed (CRLH) transmission line (TL) stubs are presented. We show that, by modifying the dispersion diagram of the CRLH TL stub, the frequency band or the harmonic tuning capability can be enhanced in such a way that it would have been difficult or impractical if done using conventional micro-strip line stubs. The frequency response of the CRLH TL stub can be controlled almost arbitrarily while at the same time reducing the stub length significantly, because the dispersion curve in the left-handed region and in the right-handed region is controlled independently. As a proof of concept, a triple-band rectifier, single-band and dual-band harmonic tuning circuits for class-F amplifiers are demonstrated.

An equivalent-circuit model is an effective tool for the analysis and design of metamaterials. This paper describes a systematic and theoretical method for the circuit modeling of meta-atoms. We focus on the structures of wired metallic spheres and propose a method for deriving a sophisticated equivalent circuit that has the same topology as the wires using the partial element equivalent circuit (PEEC) method. Our model contains the effect of external electromagnetic coupling: excitation by an external field modeled by voltage sources and radiation modeled by the radiation resistances for each mode. The equivalent-circuit model provides the characteristics of meta-atoms such as the resonant frequencies and the resonant modes induced by the current distribution in the wires by an external excitation. Although the model is obtained by a very coarse discretization, it provides a good agreement with an electromagnetic simulation.

A novel compact multi-input multi-output (MIMO) antenna system with split-ring resonator (SRR), a popular metamaterial structure, is presented. The MIMO antenna system consists of SRRs as radiator elements arranged close to each other on a printed circuit board. We evaluate the antenna characteristics with a single and two SRR elements arranged within various sizes of area. We also analyze MIMO channel capacities of SRR elements by using radiation patterns. The obtained results confirm that the proposed MIMO antenna system can achieve the same channel capacity as a conventional MIMO antenna system but with a 30% smaller footprint area and is very suitable for compact wireless equipment in next-generation wireless systems.

Magnet-less non-reciprocal metamaterial (MNM) synthesise artificial magnetic gyrotropy by metal ring resonator with unilateral component insertion. Clear advantage to natural magnetic material is full integrated circuit ingredient compatibility but still suffers from drawbacks of consumption power in active component and footprint of ring resonator. A new MNM structure by a varactor inserted figure of eight resonator is introduced, which enables reduction of active components by half and even smaller footprint to the original simple ring resonator structure in addition to frequency tunability.

A compact composite right/left-handed transmission-line (CRLH TL) stub resonator is presented. The bandpass frequency of the resonator and the adjacent transmission-zeros are determined by the negative order resonance modes of the stub line. We demonstrate that these resonance frequencies can be arbitrarily controlled by using non-identical, unbalanced unit cells, leading to enhanced loaded-Q as well as unloaded-Q. We show that despite the presence of lumped element loss the unloaded-Q is enhanced by a factor of 2 compared to that of microstrip line as a result of nearly-zero group velocity. As a consequence, the loaded-Q can be increased without incurring significant insertion loss as in the case of conventional stub resonators on the same substrate. The physical mechanisms of the distinct features are discussed based on an equivalent dispersion diagram, a concept introduced to model general one-port CRLH TL used as a stub line.

This paper proposes a sector base station antenna for mobile wireless communication systems employing multiple woodpile metamaterial reflectors and a multiband radiator that establishes the same beamwidth in the horizontal plane for more than two frequency bands. Electromagnetic Band Gap (EBG) characteristics of each metamaterial reflector can be controlled through structural parameters of the woodpile reflector, e.g., the rod width and rod spacing. As an example of the proposed antenna, a design for a triple-frequency-band antenna that radiates at 800 MHz, 2,GHz, and 4,GHz is shown. The algorithm used to adjust the beamwidth of the proposed antenna is newly introduced and adjusts the beamwidth to be the same for each band using the rod width of the woodpile. A prototype of the proposed antenna has the approximately 90$^{circ}$ beamwidth in the horizontal plane at the three frequencies, and the measurement results agree well with the electromagnetic field simulation results.

Phase-nonreciprocal ε-negative and CRLH metamaterials are analyzed using a new approach in which field analysis and transmission line model are combined. The examined one-dimensional nonreciprocal metamaterials are composed of a ferrite-embedded microstrip line periodically loaded with shunt stubs. In the present approach, the phase constant nonreciprocity is analytically estimated and formulated under the assumption of operating frequency far above the ferromagnetic resonant frequency. The present approach gives a good explanation to the phenomenon in terms of ferromagnetic properties of the ferrite and asymmetric geometry of the metamaterial structure, showing a good agreement with numerical simulations and experiment.

Several broad bandwidth, electrically small, non-Foster element-augmented antennas have been designed, analyzed and measured. Both electric loop (protractor) and electric dipole (Egyptian axe) structures have been selected as the near-field resonant parasitic (NFRP) elements for these antenna designs. In order to increase their instantaneous 10dB bandwidth, negative impedance convertor (NIC)-based capacitor and inductor elements have been designed accordingly to be incorporated internally into those NFRP elements. Proper design and analysis procedures for these systems are introduced. The simulated performance characteristics of the resulting non-Foster element-augmented protractor and Egyptian axe dipole antennas are presented. Favorable comparisons with their experimentally measured values are demonstrated.

Metamaterials are generally defined as a class of artificial effective media which macroscopically exhibit extraordinary electromagnetic properties that may not be found in nature, and are composed of periodically structured dielectric, or magnetic, or metallic materials. This paper reviews recently developed electromagnetic modeling methods of metamatericals and their inherent basic ideas, with a focus on full wave numerical techniques. Methods described in this paper are the Method of Moments (MoM) and the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) Method for scattering problems excited by an incident plane wave and a single nonperiodic source, and the Finite Element Method (FEM), the Finite Difference Frequency Domain (FDFD) method and the FDTD method for band diagram calculations.

The left-handed (LH) operation of a three-dimensional (3-D) LH material composed of wired metallic spheres is experimentally confirmed. A 15153-cell periodic structure designed to have an isotropic LH characteristics is fabricated by a 3-D printer with post plating technology, and near-field measurements of refracted waves by the negative refractive index slab lens are carried out. The dispersion characteristics measured from the near-field distributions on the surface of the LH material clearly show that the structure supports the backward waves at 12 GHz band. It is also shown experimentally that the resolution of the slab lens exceeds the diffraction limit by near field measurements with a single source and adjacent two sources. In addition, near-field measurements from the LH material near the Γ-point frequency at 12.90 GHz are carried out. A highly directive plane wave with a single point source is observed and the near-zero-index operation has been confirmed.

We propose a novel metamaterial antenna that is based on loading a single complementary split ring resonator (CSRR) onto a substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) structure. Negative order and zeroth-order resonance can be observed in the proposed structure. These resonance modes are used to reduce the antenna size. In addition, a high quality (Q) factor of the CSRR-loaded SIW structure can minimize the radiation loss. The -1st, 0th, and 1st resonances are experimentally observed at 6.63, 13.68, and 20.31 GHz with maximum gains of 1.59, 3.97, 6.83 dBi, respectively. The electrical size of the antenna at the -1st resonance is only 42% of the resonance of a square microstrip patch antenna.

We present a review of several types of microwave antennas made of metamaterials, including the resonant electrically small antennas, metamaterial-substrate patch antennas, metamaterial flat-lens antennas, and Luneburg lens antennas. In particular, we propose a new type of conformal antennas using anisotropic zero-index metamaterials, which have high gains and low sidelobes. Numerical simulations and experimental results show that metamaterials have unique properties to design new antennas with high performance.

This paper proposes a novel metamaterial structure, which equivalently indicates negative permittivity, for the purpose of applying it to a near-field imaging and/or diagnostics of electromagnetic properties by using a surface plasmon in microwave frequency range. The proposed structure consists of a conducting wire lattice with conducting spheres embedded at the mid-point of the wire. It is shown that a spatial dispersion of the wire lattice can be reduced significantly by the sphere. It is also shown that this structure can successfully be applied to an excitation of the surface plasmon in the microwave frequency range by adequately cutting into a thin slab.

In this letter, a new design of a metamaterial-based microstrip antenna is presented using triangular slots embedded on the ground plane to enhance the impedance bandwidth. To improve the impedance bandwidth of the proposed antenna, two resonant mode frequencies are closely allocated using the slotted ground without changing the radiator element. The impedance bandwidth of VSWR < 2.5 is measured at 2.43 GHz (37.6%) centered on 6.46 GHz, from 5.24 GHz to 7.67 GHz in good agreements with the simulated results.

Bandwidth and gain enhancement of microstrip patch antennas (MPAs) is proposed using reflective metasurface (RMS) as a superstrate. Two different types of the RMS, namely- the double split-ring resonator (DSR) and double closed-ring resonator (DCR) are separately investigated. The two antenna prototypes were manufactured, measured and compared. The experimental results confirm that the RMS loaded MPAs achieve high-gain as well as bandwidth improvement. The desinged antenna using the RMS as a superstrate has a high-gain of over 9.0 dBi and a wide impedance bandwidth of over 13%. The RMS is also utilized to achieve a thin antenna with a cavity height of 6 mm, which is equivalent to λ/21 at the center frequency of 2.45 GHz. At the same time, the cross polarization level and front-to-back ratio of these antennas are also examined.

This paper demonstrates an efficient modelling method for artificial materials using digital filtering (DF) techniques. To demonstrate the efficiency of the DF technique it is applied to an electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structure and a capacitively-loaded loop the so-called, CLL-based metamaterial. Firstly, this paper describes fine mesh simulations, in which a very small cell size (0.10.10.1 mm3) is used to model the details of an element of the structures to calculate the scattering parameters. Secondly, the scattering parameters are approximated with Padé forms and then factorised. Finally the factorised Padé forms are converted from the frequency domain to the time domain. As a result, the initial features in the fine meshes are effectively embedded into a numerical simulation with the DF boundary, in which the use of a coarse mesh is feasible (1,000 times larger in the EBG structure simulation and 680 times larger in the metamaterial simulation in terms of the volumes). By employing the coarse mesh and removal of the dielectric material calculations, the heavy computational burden required for the fine mesh simulations is mitigated and a fast, efficient and accurate modelling method for the artificial materials is achieved. In the case of the EBG structure the calculation time is reduced from 3 hours to less than 1 minute. In addition, this paper describes an antenna simulation as a specific application example of the DF techniques in electromagnetic compatibility field. In this simulation, an electric field radiated from a dipole antenna is enhanced by the DF boundary which models an artificial magnetic conductor derived from the CLL-based metamaterial. As is shown in the antenna simulation, the DF techniques model efficiently and accurately large-scale configurations.