Artificial Material Integrated Ultra-wideband Tapered Slot Antenna for Gain Enhancement with Band Notch Characteristics

The gain of the ultra-wideband tapered slot antenna (TSA) is enhanced by using broadband artificial material with band notch characteristics. The proposed artificial material unit cell is designed by fabricating non-resonant three S-shaped parallel metallic line on single side of the dielectric substrate which provides a longer current path compared to the parallel-line structure. The proposed S-shaped structure is printed on the top side of the tapered slot antenna in the extended substrate periodically. The effective refractive index of the artificial material is lower than antenna substrate and phase velocity in the region of artificial material is much higher than the other region. Therefore, the proposed artificial material acts like a beam focusing lens. The band notch at 5.5 GHz is achieved by creating a split ring resonator (SRR) slot near the balun. The basic and artificial material loaded TSAs are fabricated and the measurement results show that the gain of the basic antenna has been increased by 1.6 dBi. At the same time, the proposed antenna achieves a VSWR below 2 from 3 to 11 GHz except at 5.5 GHz with a notch band from 5.1 to 5.8 GHz for band rejection of wireless local area network (WLAN) application.