Property of nickel-powder artificial dielectric in transverse magnetic field

This paper describes the experimental results on the non-reciprocal transmission property of an X-band waveguide filled with an E-plane slab of a new type of gyrotropic medium, namely nickel-powder artificial dielectric. Both attenuation and phase shift are found to indicate a non-reciprocal nature. The interesting transmission property of the device suggests its potentiality in the construction of some reciprocal and non-reciprocal devices, e.g., wideband variable attenuators and isolators. The material itself is found to have a loss tangent nearly an order of magnitude lower than that of the conventional artificial dielectrics. The results have further been interpreted theoretically from an exact solution of this loaded waveguide problem assuming a complex tensor susceptibility for the dielectric.