Abstract
This article presents a parametric study using full-wave simulations about the potential use of cold plasma discharges to achieve frequency reconfiguration on a Sievenpiper mushroom metasurface. The study was done by inserting plasma tubes in between the patches of the mushroom structure, in three different positions with respect to the top of the metasurface, and varying the electronic density while keeping the plasma collision frequency. The obtained results show that it is possible to shift the stop-band generated by the metasurface around 25% towards lower frequencies for an electron density value inside the tubes of 1014 cm−3, when they are placed in between the top patches of the metasurface. Additional insertion losses are exhibited when operating near the plasma frequency.
Highlights
Metasurfaces are structures that have physic properties that are not found in nature regarding how they interact with electromagnetic (EM) waves [1]
Once the plasma tube parameters are defined, we proceed to simulate the metasurface with plasma inserted into the parallel plate condition, with the three different tube positions with respect to the substrate and the top metallic cap of the mushroom and varying the electron density
We can see the stop-band shift when the electron density takes values of 1013 cm−3 and 1014 cm−3, while, for low values of ne, as the permittivity is close to the unit, its behavior is close to a vacuum condition
Summary
Metasurfaces are structures that have physic properties that are not found in nature regarding how they interact with electromagnetic (EM) waves [1]. A plasma acts as a conducting or a dielectric material whose complex relative permittivity ε p is a function of its electron density ne , its electron-neutral momentum transfer collision frequency νp , and the angular frequency ω of the incident electromagnetic wave Depending on these three parameters, the real part of ε p can be negative, equal to zero, or positive with a value between 0 and 1. Plasma parameters can be controlled by external variables, such as the power injected to the discharge that has a direct influence on the electron density, and the gas pressure, and this has an influence over the plasma collision frequency [26] This characteristic makes the cold plasma discharge suitable for the implementation of reconfigurable high-frequency devices, due to the active control and variation of the plasma permittivity, and the variation of how the EM wave interacts with the discharge and the device [27,28,29,30,31,32]. We propose the assessment of a reconfigurable Sievenpiper mushroom metasurface [33] using plasma tubes as the active device by varying the electron density to achieve a frequency shift of the stop-band generated by the metasurface
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