Array Of Metallic Wires Research Articles

Experimental verification of magnetic near-field channeling using a helical-shaped wire medium lens

We experimentally verify that a magnetic uniaxial wire medium lens consisting of a racemic array of helical-shaped metallic wires may enable channeling the normal component of the magnetic field of near-field sources with resolution well below the diffraction limit over a broad bandwidth. It is experimentally demonstrated that the helical-shaped wire medium lens can be regarded as the magnetic counterpart of the usual wire medium lenses formed by straight metallic wires. The experimental results are validated with full-wave numerical simulations. We envision that the proposed metamaterial lens may have potential applications in magnetic resonance imaging, near-field wireless power transfer, and sensing.

Electrostatic screening in a wire medium

We extensively study screening in anisotropic artificial media formed by arrays of parallel metal wires both analytically and experimentally. Our findings show that the electrostatic potential distribution produced by probe charge is spherically symmetrical in the vicinity of the source. We also derive a boundary condition for the wire medium and confirm its validity experimentally. Despite the finite dimensions of the wire arrays, the field symmetry near the charge remains unaffected, but a local maximum potential is produced at the boundary. The screening depth of the wire medium is determined by its geometrical parameters and is proportional to the plasma frequency, which leads us to propose an experimental method for defining plasma frequency through static E-field measurement.

High Data Capacity Chipless RFID Tag Based on Time-Domain Scattering Modulation

In this communication, we present a low-cost chipless radio frequency identification (RFID) tag with a high data capacity and a wide reading range based on time-domain scattering modulation. The proposed tag consists of a slotted square patch antenna with a switchable resistor and a mechanically driven slider etched with a barcode-like metallic wire array. Encoding is achieved by the presence and absence of the metallic wire on the slider, and tag identification is obtained by sequential bit reading. A special encoding strategy is applied to improve its insensitivity to the motion velocity of the slider. For a proof-of-concept demonstration, a prototype designed to operate at 2.1 GHz was fabricated and measured, and the experimental results verified the effectiveness. Compared with the methods based on time-domain reflectometry, spectral signature, and resonator-based sequential encoding, the proposed approach provides a substantially enhanced data capacity within a narrow spectrum without sacrificing its reading range and tag size, due to the design of nonresonant code cell. Such a mechanically triggered chipless RFID tag exhibits promising potentials in some practical applications, such as personal ID and credit cards.

Light trapping transparent electrodes with a wide-angle response.

The angle dependent transmission of light trapping transparent electrodes is investigated. The electrodes consist of triangular metallic wire arrays embedded in a dielectric cover layer. Normal incidence illumination of the structure produces light trapping via total internal reflection, virtually eliminating all shadowing losses. It is found that varying the external angle of incidence can affect the light trapping efficiency ηLT due to partial loss of internal reflection and increased interaction with neighboring wires. Despite these effects, a judicious selection of geometry and materials can reduce shadowing losses by more than 85% over a surprisingly large angular range of 120°. It is demonstrated that the angle-averaged shadowing losses in an encapsulated silicon solar cell under illumination with unpolarized light can be reduced by more than a factor of two for incident angles between -60° and +60° off-normal across the entire AM1.5 solar spectrum.

Theory and experimental observation of hyperbolic media based on structural dispersions

Hyperbolic media usually possess large dissipation induced by the inherent imaginary part in the material dispersion of their metallic components. Here, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate a route toward hyperbolic media with low dissipation: using structural dispersions. In a planar microwave waveguide filled with anisotropic dielectrics, we insert an array of metal wires and transform the original hybrid modes into pure transverse-electric modes. Interestingly, by engineering the structural dispersions such that waves are evanescent in one direction and propagating in the orthogonal direction, hyperbolic media with negligible loss can be achieved. Conical radiation pattern and negative refraction, which are characteristic phenomena of the hyperbolic media, have been numerically or experimentally demonstrated in microwaves. Our work opens an approach to utilize structural dispersions instead of material dispersions in realizing hyperbolic media with negligible loss.

Diffraction of bessel beams on 2D amplitude gratings—a new branch in the talbot effect study

In this paper, an analytical theory for the diffraction of a Bessel beam of arbitrary order Jl(κr) on a 2D amplitude grating is presented. The diffraction pattern behind the grating turned out to be more complicated in comparison with the classical Talbot effect observed under illumination by a plane wave. In particular, the patterns in the main and fractional Talbot planes under certain conditions that are found in the article, are lattices of ring microbeams, the diameters of which depend on the period of the grating, the diameter of the illuminating beam, the number of the Talbot plane, and the topological charge l. For the rings near the optical axis, the latter reproduces l of the illuminating beam. The diffraction patterns observed in experiments on the Novosibirsk free electron laser behind gratings with periods of 1 to 6 mm, illuminated by zero- to second-order Bessel beams at a radiation wavelength λ = 141 µm, are in good agreement with both theoretical predictions and numerical calculations. We emphasize that an analytical theory based on the scalar theory of diffraction perfectly describes resulting diffraction patterns with hole diameters down to 0.25 mm, which are less than 2λ, when, formally speaking, the scalar theory becomes incorrect. Since the Laguerre–Gaussian beams can be represented as a superposition of Bessel beams, results of this paper can be applied to analysis of the Talbot effect with the Laguerre–Gaussian beams. A regular lattice of ring-like vortex microbeams, which can be formed in the Talbot planes, can be applied, for example, to creation of a lattice of optical traps, transmission of orbital angular momentum to elements of micromechanical devices, and to launching surface plasmon polaritons on an array of metal wires by ‘the end-fire coupling technique’.

Analysis of Thin Truncated Cylinder Scatterers Using Incomplete Hankel Functions and Surface Impedance Boundary Conditions

The incomplete Hankel functions (IHFs) are employed to evaluate the scattered field from thin truncated cylinders excited by uniform plane waves or by arbitrarily oriented elemental current sources. Metallic and dielectric lossy structures are modeled by means of impedance boundary conditions (IBCs) including surface curvature effects. The scattering currents, expanded in triangular basis functions, are determined upon solving electrical field integral equations (EFIEs) by means of the point-matching method of moments (MoM). The scattered field is then expressed in closed analytical form in terms of IHFs, thus yielding highly accurate numerical results. Furthermore, accurate IHFs approximants are also derived to reduce the computational burden in the analysis of large electrical structures. The proposed approach is demonstrated in practical applications involving cylindrical dielectric structures used in planar lenses, lossy dielectric cylinders suitable to model cane-like vegetation, as well as polarization rotators featuring multiple stages composed of thin metallic wire arrays.

Guided electromagnetic waves for periodic arrays of thin metallic wires near an interface between two dielectric media.

Guided localized electromagnetic waves propagating along one-dimensional (1D) arrays of thin metallic parallel wires, finite and infinite, are studied. The arrays are embedded into the upper dielectric half-space close to the interface separating it from the lower dielectric medium with different permittivity and the same permeability. Firstly, a dependence of resonance frequencies of excited wave modes for finite array with respect to the array height above the interface is studied. The array is excited by a normally incident plane wave. It is important that the order of the resonance modes changes if the distance between the array and the interface becomes small. An analysis, based on the Pocklington system of integral equations to evaluate resonance frequencies and compute the fields of excited modes above the array, was applied. This approach is based on the longwave approximation of thin wires. Secondly, the waves propagating along infinite 1D array of thin metallic wires that is close to the interface are studied. Dispersion curves are presented for the lowest case of half-wave resonance for different heights of the array over the interface. When the array approaches very close to the interface an anomalous dispersion is observed. The results of the numerical analysis were tested against computations obtained by means of other independent CST Studio Suite simulations.

High performance microstrip monopole antenna with loaded metamaterial wire medium superstrate

A novel design of printed monopole antenna loaded with wire medium is developed for radar applications. The advocated design aims to simultaneously enhance the gain and bandwidth of the proposed geometry. The proposed antenna is composed of a circular patch etched with double C-shaped slots and the ground is defected to achieve wide bandwidth. Wire medium superstrate and a metal reflector are implemented to provide high gain. The promising tunable wire medium superstrate consists of a periodic array of parallel metallic wires arranged in a rectangular pattern that mimic the behavior of epsilon-near-to-zero (ENZ) metamaterial. This medium is suspended at a distance of a quarter-wavelength in air above the antenna to provide the optimum gain and reduce the side lobes level. Prototype of the optimized antenna is fabricated using Rogers's substrate to offer −10 dB bandwidth over the entire frequency range (900 MHz to 2.85 GHz). Details of the design process are investigated through full wave electromagnetic simulations performed by CST software. Experimental results of the fabricated prototype are presented and also compared with simulation results where an appreciable agreement between them is demonstrated.

Vertically oriented metamaterial broadband linear polariser

Control and manipulation of polarisation is an important topic for imaging and light matter interactions. In the infrared regime, the large wavelengths make wire grid polarisers (WGPs) a viable option, as it is possible to create periodic arrays of metallic wires at that scale. The recent advent of metamaterials has spurred an increase in non-traditional polariser motifs centred around more complicated repeat units, which potentially provide more functionality. The authors explore the use of 2D arrays of single and back-to-back vertically oriented cross dipoles arranged in a cubic in-plane silicon matrix. They show that both single and back-to-back versions have higher rejection ratios and larger bandwidths than either WGPs or 2D arrays of linear dipoles.

Split-nanotube-based negative index metamaterial for midinfrared wavelengths

A design of split-nanotube-based negative index metamaterial for the infrared spectrum has been proposed. The proposed design and its operation are similar to that of a split-ring resonator (SRR) without inheriting the fabrication difficulties associated with conventional SRR. A negative refractive index has been achieved using a split-nanotube in combination with a periodic array of metallic wires between 1.5 and 3.3 μ m . © 2017 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

Hyperbolic Weyl Point in Reciprocal Chiral Metamaterials.

We report the existence of Weyl points in a class of noncentral symmetric metamaterials, which has time reversal symmetry, but does not have inversion symmetry due to chiral coupling between electric and magnetic fields. This class of metamaterial exhibits either type-I or type-II Weyl points depending on its nonlocal response. We also provide a physical realization of such metamaterial consisting of an array of metal wires in the shape of elliptical helices which exhibits type-II Weyl points.

Cloaking of solar cell contacts at the onset of Rayleigh scattering.

Electrical contacts on the top surface of solar cells and light emitting diodes cause shadow losses. The phenomenon of extraordinary optical transmission through arrays of subwavelength holes suggests the possibility of engineering such contacts to reduce the shadow using plasmonics, but resonance effects occur only at specific wavelengths. Here we describe instead a broadband effect of enhanced light transmission through arrays of subwavelength metallic wires, due to the fact that, in the absence of resonances, metal wires asymptotically tend to invisibility in the small size limit regardless of the fraction of the device area taken up by the contacts. The effect occurs for wires more than an order of magnitude thicker than the transparency limit for metal thin films. Finite difference in time domain calculations predict that it is possible to have high cloaking efficiencies in a broadband wavelength range, and we experimentally demonstrate contact shadow losses less than half of the geometric shadow.

Carbon nanotube fiber terahertz polarizer

Conventional, commercially available terahertz (THz) polarizers are made of uniformly and precisely spaced metallic wires. They are fragile and expensive, with performance characteristics highly reliant on wire diameters and spacings. Here, we report a simple and highly error-tolerant method for fabricating a freestanding THz polarizer with nearly ideal performance, reliant on the intrinsically one-dimensional character of conduction electrons in well-aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs). The polarizer was constructed on a mechanical frame over which we manually wound acid-doped CNT fibers with ultrahigh electrical conductivity. We demonstrated that the polarizer has an extinction ratio of ∼−30 dB with a low insertion loss (<0.5 dB) throughout a frequency range of 0.2–1.1 THz. In addition, we used a THz ellipsometer to measure the Müller matrix of the CNT-fiber polarizer and found comparable attenuation to a commercial metallic wire-grid polarizer. Furthermore, based on the classical theory of light transmission through an array of metallic wires, we demonstrated the most striking difference between the CNT-fiber and metallic wire-grid polarizers: the latter fails to work in the zero-spacing limit, where it acts as a simple mirror, while the former continues to work as an excellent polarizer even in that limit due to the one-dimensional conductivity of individual CNTs.

Magnetic uniaxial wire medium

It is shown that a racemic array of helical-shaped metallic wires may have a dual electromagnetic response, such that for arbitrarily large wavelengths it concurrently supports two modes with hyperbolic- and elliptical-type dispersions. Importantly, one of the eigenwaves is nearly dispersionless and sees the metamaterial as a medium with extreme magnetic anisotropy. The metamaterial may thus behave as the magnetic analog of the conventional wire medium formed by a set of parallel straight metallic wires. It is demonstrated that the magnetic wire medium enables channeling the subwavelength details of transverse electric (TE) polarized waves.

Enhancement of Magnetic Resonance Imaging with Metasurfaces.

It is revealed that the unique properties of ultrathin metasurface resonators can improve magnetic resonance imaging dramatically. A metasurface formed when an array of metallic wires is placed inside a scanner under the studied object and a substantial enhancement of the radio-frequency magnetic field is achieved by means of subwavelength manipulation with the metasurface, also allowing improved image resolution.

Impurity-Mediated Early Condensation of a Charge Density Wave in an Atomic Wire Array.

We directly show how impurity atoms induce the condensation of a representative electronic phase, the charge density wave (CDW) phase, in atomic scale with scanning tunneling microscopy. Oxygen impurity atoms on the self-assembled metallic atomic wire array on a silicon crystal condense the CDW locally above the pristine transition temperature. More interestingly, the CDW along the wires is induced not by a single atomic impurity but by the cooperation of multiple impurities. First-principles calculations disclose the mechanism of the cooperation as the coherent superposition of the local lattice strain induced by impurities, stressing the coupled electronic and lattice degrees of freedom for the CDW. This opens the possibility of the strain engineering over electronic phases of atomic-scale systems.

Side Lobe Reduction in an X-Band Horn Antenna Loaded by a Wire Medium

Through electromagnetic simulation, the present work reports on a comparative study of the enhanced radiation properties of a standard X-band horn antenna loaded by a wire medium. Acting as an artificial dielectric the wire medium consists of an array of parallel metallic wires installed into the antenna with the wires oriented in the direction of the incident electric field. As compared with the properties of the empty antenna, the wire-medium antenna produces appreciable reduction in the side-lobe levels with an improvement of 10 dB at 8.87 GHz in the first side lobe. For the wire-medium antenna, the E- and H-planes look similar, a property desired for precision radar and radiometric mapping systems.

Tunable dual-band subwavelength imaging with a wire medium slab loaded with nanostructured graphene metasurfaces

In this paper, we demonstrate that a wire medium slab loaded with graphene-nanopatch metasurfaces (GNMs) enables the enhancement of evanescent waves for the subwavelength imaging at terahertz (THz) frequencies. The analysis is based on the nonlocal homogenization model for wire medium with the additional boundary condition at the connection of wires to graphene. The physical mechanism behind this lens can be described as the surface plasmons excitement at the lower and upper GNMs which are coupled by an array of metallic wires. The dual nature (capacitive/inductive) of the GNM is utilized in order to design a dual-band lens in which the unique controllable properties of graphene and the structural parameters of wire medium (WM) slab provide more degrees of freedom in controlling two operating frequency bands. The lens can support the subwavelength imaging simultaneously at two tunable distinct frequencies with the resolution better than λ/6 even if the distance between GNMs is a significant fraction of wavelength (>λ/5.5). The major future challenges in the fabrication of the lens have been demonstrated and a promising approach for the practical configuration of the lens has been proposed.

Perfect metal phases of one-dimensional and anisotropic higher-dimensional systems

We show that a 1D quantum wire with $23$ channels of interacting fermions has a perfect metal phase in which all weak perturbations that could destabilize this phase are irrelevant. Consequently, weak disorder does not localize it, a weak periodic potential does not open a gap, and contact with a superconductor also fails to open a gap. Similar phases occur for $N \geq 24$ channels of fermions, except for $N=25$, and for $8k$ channels of interacting bosons, with $k\geq 3$. Arrays of perfect metallic wires form higher-dimensional fermionic or bosonic perfect metals, albeit highly-anisotropic ones.