Toward the synthesis of an artificial magnetic medium

During our investigation of various wire structures we have discovered that single and double folded dipoles so-called "hairpins" with a conducting connection placed between the two ends fulfils the requirements of both high backscatter and small phase over a wide frequency range. We present one example of such a geometry and investigate its scattering properties. In order to further minimise the phases over the frequency range of interest a genetic algorithm was used to determine the optimum structure geometry required to achieve this goal. The GA-optimized hairpin geometry and its corresponding backscattering properties are also presented and discussed.