Array factor approach of leaky-wave antennas and application to 1-D/2-D composite right/left-handed (CRLH) structures

An array factor approach of leaky-wave (LW) antennas is proposed for efficient and fast computation of the radiation patterns of complex metamaterial LW structures of arbitrary length from the analysis of a single periodic unit cell. This approach is demonstrated in one-dimensional and two-dimensional composite right/left-handed (CRLH) LW antennas.