Electrically steerable leaky-wave antenna capable of both forward and backward radiation based on liquid crystal

In this paper, a electrically beam scanning leaky-wave antenna (LWA) based on composite right/left-handed (CRLH) rectangular waveguide (RWG) is presented. In the proposed LWA, liquid crystal (LC) is chosen as tunable material, which could be controlled by applied electric and magnetic field. The beam of LWA proposed can be steered at a fixed frequency as the electromagnetic parameters of LC change under different bias voltages. The designed antenna supports the backward-to-forward beam scanning. It is found from simulations that the antenna has a beam scanning angle from -19° to 12° at 9.7 GHz.