A novel approach to determine the plasma frequency for wire media

Analytical, simulation and experiment based technique has been reported in this paper to determine the plasma frequency of artificial media formed by arrays of parallel conducting wires called wire media. A generalized analytical approach based on quasi-static analysis has been done and compared with previously reported results to determine the plasma frequency of wire media. An eigenmode solver based simulation method has been used for plasma frequency extraction of infinite wire array using a commercial finite element method (FEM) based electromagnetic solver. The limitations of scattering-parameter based technique has been discussed and a new loss-factor method has been proposed. On the basis of simulated data, wire array has been fabricated and experiments has been carried out at X-band (8.2–12.4 GHz). Loss-factor method has been validated using the experimental data. Finally, the results of different techniques are compared to establish the efficacy of the loss-factor method supported by experimental results.