A broadband, circular-polarization selective surface

Abstract

We introduce a new technique for designing wideband circular-polarization selective surfaces (CPSSs) based on anisotropic miniaturized element frequency selective surfaces. The proposed structure is a combination of two linear-to-circular polarization converters sandwiching a linear polarizer. This CPSS consists of a number of metallic layers separated from each other by thin dielectric substrates. The metallic layers are in the form of two-dimensional arrays of subwavelength capacitive patches and inductive wire grids with asymmetric dimensions and a wire grid polarizer with sub-wavelength period. The proposed device is designed to offer a wideband circular-polarization selection capability allowing waves with left-hand circular polarization to pass through while rejecting those having right-hand circular polarization. A synthesis procedure is developed that can be used to design the proposed CPSS based on its desired band of operation. Using this procedure, a prototype of the proposed CPSS operating in the 12–18 GHz is designed. Full-wave electromagnetic simulations are used to predict the response of this structure. These simulation results confirm the validity of the proposed design concept and synthesis procedure and show that proposed CPSS operates within a fractional bandwidth of 40% with a co-polarization transmission discrimination of more than 15 dB. Furthermore, the proposed design is shown to be capable of providing an extremely wide field of view of ±60°.