2009 13th International Symposium on Antenna Technology and Applied Electromagnetics and the Canadian Radio Sciences Meeting

Metamaterial-inspired Engineering of Antenna Systems

Richard W. Ziolkowski
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Arizona,
1230 E. Speedway Blvd., Tucson, AZ, 85721, USA, ziolkowski@ece.arizona.edu

A number of advances in the use of metamaterials and metamaterial-inspired

structures to improve the overall efficiency and bandwidth performance of electrically
small antennas (ESAs) in the VHF, UHF and microwave regimes will be reviewed.

Metamaterials have led to a different paradigm for achieving electrically small

radiating and scattering systems. Many of our initial electric and magnetic metamaterial-
based ESA designs [1] have been realized through the introduction of the corresponding
metamaterial-inspired near-field resonant parasitic element antennas [2]. Their further
miniaturization at VHF and UHF frequencies has been enabled by introducing lumped
elements as was done to achieve the highly subwavelength ENG, MNG, and DNG unit
cells reported in [3]. Many of these metamaterial-inspired ESA designs have now been
fabricated and tested. The measurement results are in very nice agreement with their
predicted behaviors. These results will be presented and discussed. While these initial
efforts emphasized high overall efficiencies without using any external matching
networks, more recent resonant near-field parasitic designs have also explored how close
their Q values can come to the Chu limit. Several of these ESA designs, their frequency
bandwidths, and their associated Q values will be compared to various reported limits.

It will also be shown that the corresponding active metamaterial element versions of
these metamaterial-inspired ESA designs, i.e., replacing the internal passive elements in
successful narrow bandwidth, high overall efficiency designs with active elements, could
potentially have very large instantaneous bandwidths while maintaining their overall
efficiencies even when they are very electrically small. Related active coated nano-sized
particle designs at optical frequencies have led to highly sub-wavelength lasing systems
[4] and their proposed nano-sensor and nano-antenna applications.

Acknowledgments: This work was supported in part by DARPA Contract number

HR0011-05-C-0068.

REFERENCES
[1] R. W. Ziolkowski and A. Erentok, “Metamaterial-based efficient electrically small
antennas,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat., vol. 54, pp. 2113-2130, July 2006.
[2] A. Erentok and R. W. Ziolkowski, “Metamaterial-inspired efficient electrically-small
antennas,” IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 691-707, March 2008.
[3] A. Erentok, R. W. Ziolkowski, J. A. Nielsen, R. B. Greegor, C. G. Parazzoli, M. H.
Tanielian, S. A. Cummer, B.-I. Popa, T. Hand, D. C. Vier and S. Schultz, “Low
Frequency Lumped Element-based Negative Index Metamaterial,” Appl. Phys. Lett.,
vol. 91, 184104, November 2007.
[4] J. A. Gordon and R. W. Ziolkowski, “The design and simulated performance of a
coated nano-particle laser,” Opt. Exp., Vol. 15, Issue 5, pp. 2622-2653, March 2007.

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