The Microwave Response of Square Mesh Metamaterials

Metamaterials are a class of artificial material, known to produce electromagnetic (EM) responses not found in nature due to their engineered subwavelength structure. In this thesis very thin subwavelength meshes are utilised to form layered metamaterials. The EM characteristics of the transmission and reflection response from these materials, including the polarisation converting behaviour, are explored to further understanding and develop structures to exploit and control the propagation of microwave radiation. Original experimental studies are presented across two sections; the first examines the response of stacks assembled from metallic meshes and dielectric plates; the second explores a rotated layered structure formed of square symmetric elements in a square subwavelength array that demonstrates chirality through evanescent coupling of the near fields. When metallic meshes are excited with EM radiation below the cut off frequency, only evanescently decaying fields are supported in the holes. By combining these subwavelength metallic meshes with dielectric plates in different arrangements, remarkably wide bands of high transmission and low reflection may be observed. The non-interacting resonant modes allow the response to be tuned through a suitable choice of the metallic mesh geometry and the properties of the dielectric. Further the low frequency band edge and the bandwidth are not dependent on the number of unit cells in the stack; but are dependent on the properties of the unit cell. The second section demonstrates ``evanescent handedness'' proposed as a new type of chirality. Two subwavelength square arrays of square elements are rotated with respect to one another. When the rotated arrays are positioned far from one another in the propagation direction, each acts as an effective medium layer. However when placed in close proximity the structure is shown to rotate the plane of polarisation of the incident radiation. All these mesh based structures share the property of producing an EM response that is tunable by design, allowing a structure to be tailored to a specific application.