Metamaterial Inspired Optically Transparent Band-Selective Ground Planes for Antenna Applications

This paper presents a technique for design of wideband optically transparent band-selective ground planes (BSGP) using the concept of miniaturized element frequency selective surfaces (MEFSS). The proposed multi-layer approach can provide very large bandwidth and high out of band rejection while keeping the thickness of the ground plane very low. Essentially the thickness of the ground plane made to be almost independent of the bandwidth in order to reduce its weight and sensitivity to the angle of incidence and the shape of the wavefront of the incoming radiation. As a starting point, a single pole MEFSS is studied and its performance in terms of transparency and bandwidth is compared to the traditional wire grid and transparent conductive coatings. Next, the proposed multi-pole BSGP design method is introduced and its performance is evaluated numerically and experimentally.