Plasmonic Luneburg lens antenna synthesized by metasurfaces with hexagonal lattices

The metasurface lens composing of 2D periodic metallic patches on a grounded dielectric slab possesses several advantages such as being light, low-profile, compact, and also cheap to manufacture. In this paper, a Luneburg lens synthesized by a metasurface and designated for use as a surface wave antenna is proposed. Two types of unit cell will be compared, one whose surface wave modal dispersion varies significantly with the grazing direction and another that does not. In the context of being applied as surface wave antennas, it will be shown that the Luneburg lens synthesized by the latter kind of unit cell provides improved performance as compared to the former. Several aperture sub-efficiencies of the metasurface-based Luneburg-lens antenna shall be used for the characterization of the radiation. A prototype of the designed lens antenna has also been manufactured. Measurement results agree well with theoretical predictions and the efficacy of this device over a fairly wide bandwidth has been experimentally demonstrated.