k-dispersion engineering of spoof surface plasmon polaritons for beam steering

In this paper, we propose to achieve beam steering by k-dispersion engineering of spoof surface plasmon polaritons (spoof SPP) at microwave frequencies. The planar plasmonic metamaterials (PPMs) are employed to couple and guide spoof SPP. High-efficiency transmission based on spoof SPP coupling is realized via matching the wave-vectors of the spoof SPP and the space wave. The transmission phase can be modulated by k-dispersion engineering of the spoof SPP with great freedom. Due to the independent phase shift produced by the spoof SPP on the PPMs, the phase gradient achieved by using the PPMs as the sub-unit cells can be altered by changing the repetition period of the sub-unit cells. Two phase gradient materials (PGMs) are achieved by using nine different PPMs as the sub-unit cells with the repetition period q = 4mm and 4.5mm. Both the simulated and measured results demonstrated the excellent performances of the PGMs on high efficiency, wideband, tunable beam steering.