Study of Forward and Backward Modes in Double-Sided Dielectric-Filled Corrugated Waveguides

This work studies the propagation characteristics of a rectangular waveguide with aligned/misaligned double-sided dielectric-filled metallic corrugations. Two modes are found to propagate in the proposed double-sided configuration below the hollow-waveguide cutoff frequency: a quasi-resonant mode and a backward mode. This is in contrast to the single-sided configuration, which only allows for backward propagation. Moreover, the double-sided configuration can be of interest for waveguide miniaturization on account of the broader band of its backward mode. The width of the stopband between the quasi-resonant and backward modes can be controlled by the misalignment of the top and bottom corrugations, being null for the glide-symmetric case. The previous study is complemented with numerical results showing the impact of the height of the corrugations, as well as the filling dielectric permittivity, on the bandwidth and location of the appearing negative-effective-permeability band. The multi-modal transmission-matrix method has also been employed to estimate the rejection level and material losses in the structure and to determine which port modes are associated with the quasi-resonant and backward modes. Finally, it is shown that glide symmetry can advantageously be used to reduce the dispersion and broadens the operating band of the modes.