A high efficiency wideband co-polarised metalens antenna

Abstract

The traditional co-polarised metasurface achieves 360° phase coverage only at the resonant frequency but not full phase coverage across a wide bandwidth. This paper proposes a multilayer structure metasurface, which composes of five layers of metal patch and four layers of medium, forming the Fabry–Perry resonator, using the principle of the cancellation of two polarisation conversion, which can achieve a wideband efficient co-polarisation transmission. Based on the metasurface transmission phase principle, 360° phase coverage has been achieved by changing the geometric parameters of the intermediate metal patches. Through phase compensation arrangement, a metalens is designed using the proposed metasurface unit cell. At the same time, horn antenna is used as a feed to feed the metalens, which can significantly improve the gain of the antenna within a wideband. Simulated and measured results show that the proposed metalens antenna operates at 22–26 GHz, and the maximum measured gain of the metalens antenna reaches 24.16 dBi at 25 GHz, which is 10.85 dB higher than the horn antenna without metasurface compensation, showing good focusing performance. The proposed multilayer metasurface breaks the narrow band limit of the traditional stacked metasurface in principle, opening a way in the broadband metasurface design.