Frozen modes in bounded photonic crystals for high gain antennas

Photonic crystals have been the subject of extensive research for almost twenty years. More recently, the physical nature of the constitutive components was diversified to include anisotropic, magnetic, metallic, and nonlinear materials. Greater diversity of physical properties, along with more sophisticated space arrangement of the constituents, can result in qualitatively new features and novel phenomena, such as electromagnetic unidirectionality and the frozen mode regime. The resulting structures are referred to as magnetic photonic crystals (MPCs). This presentation provides analysis that demonstrates the benefits and potential applications of MPCs and degenerate bandgap structures (DBEs) from a numerical and experimental point of view. Three dimensional realizations of antennas and conformal arrays within MPCs are presented using frequency domain and time domain techniques, and preliminary experimental data are given for validation purposes