| A left-handed artificial dielectric is proposed in this thesis. Resonating broadside coupled patches generate negative permeability while thin strips generate negative permittivity. Together they produce a negative index of refraction that is matched to free space. The structure is fabricated from a single dielectric sheet printed on both sides by metal patterns that couple to externally incident plane waves of any linear polarization. Unlike many previously published microwave implementations, the waves interact through perpendicular incidence to the surface. The structure was characterized for loss, polarization independence, off-normal transverse-electric incidence, and anisotropy. An experiment was carried out at 10 GHz to verify the left-handed behavior with an extracted index of refraction of -1.04 matched to free space with 26.0 dB return loss and 0.77 dB insertion loss. A multi-layer version was also designed that achieved fractional dispersion bandwidths comparable to those of transmission-line implementations. |
