Extraction of the Electromagnetic Parameters of a Metamaterial Using the Nicolson–Ross–Weir Method: An Analysis Based on Global Analytic Functions and Riemann Surfaces

The characterization of electromagnetic metamaterials (MMs) plays a fundamental role in their engineering processes. To this end, the Nicolson–Ross–Weir (NRW) method is intensively used to recover the effective parameters of MMs, even though this is affected by the branch ambiguity problem. In this paper, we face this issue in the context of global analytic functions and Riemann surfaces. This point of view allows us to rigorously demonstrate the mathematical foundations of an algorithmic approach for avoiding the branch ambiguity problem, in which the phase unwrapping method is merged with K-K relations for recovering the effective parameters of an MM. In addition, exploiting the intimate relationship between the K-K relations and the Hilbert transform, a simple variant of the above algorithm is presented.