A novel approach to low profile scanning antenna design using reconfigurable metasurfaces

A novel approach for the design of scanning antennas is proposed. It relies on the use of a reconfigurable metasurface (MTS) whose modulation can be adjusted so as to vary the pointing angle of the supported leaky wave. The building block of the MTS is an electrically very small bistable elementary cell, or “MTS bit”; proper combinations of a number of these MTS bits lead to “MTS bytes” exhibiting different equivalent surface impedances. A leaky wave antenna can be realized by periodically arranging the MTS bytes. By acting on the switches controlling the single bits it is possible to modify the global modulation of the surface impedance, and hence to vary the leaky wave antenna pointing angle. This leads to an extremely light, low profile and potentially low cost scanning antenna.