Composite metamaterial enabled excellent performance of microstrip antenna array

This paper reports that the split ring resonators and complementary split ring resonators are compounded to construct a novel compact composite metamaterial. The composite metamaterial exhibits a unique property of blocking electromagnetic wave propagating in two directions near the resonant frequency. An example of two-element microstrip antenna array demonstrates that the developed metamaterial enables array performance that is an improvement in comparison with the traditional one, including mutual coupling suppression of 9.07 dB, remarkable side lobe suppression and gain improvement of 2.14 dB. The mechanism of performance enhancement is analysed based on the electric field and Poynting vector distributions in array. The present work not only is a meaningful exploration of new type composite metamaterial design, but also opens up possibilities for extensive metamaterial applications to antenna engineer.