Dog bone triplet metamaterial wave plate

Metamaterials are artificially made sub-wavelength structures arranged in periodic arrays.They can be designed to interact with electromagnetic radiation in many different and interesting ways such as allowing radiation to experience a negative refractive index (NRI).We have used this technique to design and build a quasi-optical HalfWave Plate (HWP) that exhibits a large birefringence by virtue of having a positive refractive index in one axis and a NRI in the other.Previous implementations of such NRI-HWP have been narrow band (1-3%) due to the inherent reliance on needing a resonance to create the NRI region.We manufacture a W-band prototype of a novel HWP that uses the Pancharatnam method to extend the bandwidth (up to more than twice) of a usual NRI-HWP.Our simulated and experimentally obtained results despite their differences show that a broadening of a °at region of the phase difference is possible even with the initially steep gradient for a single plate.