Metamaterials

Metamaterials promise unique advances in antenna performance. By using advanced techniques to combine two or more readily available materials, new materials may be developed having any desired electromagnetic characteristics.

ESL’s Research Focus

metamaterials examples and chart
  • Develop new exotic materials, composites, and printed structures that exhibit novel properties to realize high performance (small, higher gain, conformal) multifunctional antennas and microwave structure
  • Develop computational algorithms for large conformal arrays capable of handling the new anisotropic composite materials
  • Material design and optimization
  • Applications and demonstrations

Engineered Materials with Extraordinary Dispersion

two metamaterials examples
Several ESL faculty are developing computational tools to model periodic materials with extraordinary dispersion characteristics. As a by-product, degenerate band edge dispersion was demonstrated on a prototype by ESL researchers. Simple transmission line models supporting such modes have also been developed for fast analysis of field behavior. Both concepts have been applied to designing novel antennas. We are teaming with Material Science and Engineering Department faculty to manufacture very low-loss (tan d<0.00005) ceramics with engineered anisotropy as well as extremely low loss ferromagnetic materials (tan d<0.005 at 1GHz with m'>4).