Volume 8 Issue 4
Active Microwave Metamaterials Incorporating Ideal Gain Devices
Li-Ming Si,Tao Jiang,Kihun Chang,Te-Chuan Chen,Xin Lv,Lixin Ran andHao Xin
1Department of Electronic Engineering, School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 10081, China
2Department of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China
3Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Incorporation of active devices/media such as transistors for microwave and gain media for optics may be very attractive for enabling desired low loss and broadband metamaterials. Such metamaterials can even have gain which may very well lead to new and exciting physical phenomena. We investigate microwave composite right/left-handed transmission lines (CRLH-TL) incorporating ideal gain devices such as constant negative resistance. With realistic lumped element values, we have shown that the negative phase constant of this kind of transmission lines is maintained (i.e., left-handedness kept) while gain can be obtained (negative attenuation constant of transmission line) simultaneously. Possible implementation and challenging issues of the proposed active CRLH-TL are also discussed.
Keywords: active metamaterial; negative resistance device; composite right/left-handed transmission line (CRLH-TL); dispersion/attenuation relation