Surface Plasmon Polariton Leaky-Wave Antennas With Wideband Arbitrary Multibeam Radiation
Yongsheng Pan, Yang Cheng, Yuandan Dong
Abstract
A simple method to synthesize multibeam radiation patterns with modulated linear spoof surface plasmon polariton (SSPP) leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) is proposed. We analytically proved that, for this specific type of LWA, the superposition of modulated antenna shapes can lead to a direct superposition in its radiation pattern. To validate this method, several simulations are performed, and two antennas are fabricated and tested. These results show that various types of radiation pattern, e.g., single-beam, dual-beam, or multibeam at various directions, can be achieved with little need for design efforts. The proposed antennas have features of the highly diverse radiation pattern, high gain (up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim 14.6$ </tex-math></inline-formula> dBi, measured), wideband, large frequency scanning capability ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim 120$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ° with ignorable open stopband effect at broadside), and have very simple structures that are easy to design and fabricate.