The Application of Negative Refractive Index Metamaterials to mm and Sub-mm Wavelength Instrumentation

Abstract

The manipulation of electromagnetic radiation via the use of periodic arrays of sub-wavelength metallic structures (unit cells), nowadays named "metamaterials", has been known of in the microwave engineering community for over fifty years. In the last decade interest in such sub-wavelength structures grew, mainly due to their ability to interact with radiation in ways natural materials could not e.g. by producing a negative refractive index (NRI). This project sought to see whether NRI metamaterials could provide benefits to the mm and sub-mm wavelength astronomical instrumentation currently in use. To aid rapid design and optimisation of devices made from a cascaded set of metamaterial unit cells, a hybridised Transmission Line (TL) model was developed where the matrix components used in the TL model were "seeded" with data taken from a Finite Element Method (FEM) model of a simpler structure. A comparison between the two found that the TL model was capable of providing results that differed from the FEM model by no more than ~10E-4 for the transmitted intensity, |S21|^2, and

Date of Award	1 Aug 2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Giampaolo Pisano (Supervisor)