Reconfigurable transmission lines based on self-complementary metasurfaces

This paper presents a new type of metasurface, which consists of a chessboard-type layout, made of electrically small complementary metallic patches and apertures. Depending on whether the vertexes of the patches are interconnected or not, the structure may support or not a propagating quasi-TEM mode. This offers the possibility of designing arbitrary transmission line paths on the metasurface by dynamically changing the status of the vertex connections. The concept is demonstrated with simulated results.