Microwave solid-state left-handed material with a broad bandwidth and an ultralow loss

Abstract

We present in this paper a solid-state sample of microwave metamaterial produced by a standard hot-press technique for the manufacture of printed circuit boards. We performed three experiments to demonstrate that this sample is a left-handed material with negative refractive index. The three experiments are power transmission, prism refraction, and beam shifting. We used differently shaped samples for the experiments and observed clear left-handed behaviors in a $1\text{−}\mathrm{GHz}$-wide passband with an insertion loss of less than $0.5\mathrm{dB}$ per unit cell, which is no greater than the insertion loss of many microwave devices. The sample has very stable characteristics and all results are consistent with one another.