Broadband Frequency Scanning Spoof Surface Plasmon Polariton Design with Highly Confined Endfire Radiations

This paper proposes a compact broadband frequency scanning spoof surface plasmon polariton (SSPP) based design for efficient endfire radiations with high field confinement. Through the dispersion engineering, highly confined field distribution has been obtained in the operating frequency region. The proposed SSPP antenna has achieved a continuous through endfire scanning in the X-band at other operating frequencies which is in general difficult to obtain for SSPP based antennas. In the proposed design methodology, the swore-shaped surface plasmon antenna has both edges corrugated with an array of rectangular grooves which effectively confines the electromagnetic field into a slow travelling wave. The surface impedances along both edges were engineered to be different at operating frequencies as to force the surface current to preferentially flow along either edge of the antenna to a different extent. The design with overall dimensions of (55 × 30) mm² has achieved a broadband of 4 GHz with high peak measured gain of 9.8 dBi and peak efficiency of about 95 percent in the X-band. The antenna has been further tested experimentally for scanning application of target location also.