Reconfigurable Leaky-wave Antennas with Independent Control of the Leakage Constant and Radiation Angle

This work proposes a reconfigurable leaky-wave antenna that can dynamically and independently control (a) its radiation angle (including broadside) and (b) the leakage constant at the fixed operating frequency of 5 GHz. This is achieved by realizing a reconfigurable omega-bianisotropic Huygens’ metasurface and integrating it to the design of a leakywave antenna in a waveguide environment. In particular, by synthesizing the Huygens’ metasurface in terms of four cascaded tunable impedance layers, we realize a dynamic control over the constitutive parameters of the Huygens’ metasurface. As a result, unwanted Floquet modes and any open-stopband are suppressed while dynamically controlling the leakage constant and the radiation angle. The proposed reconfigurable Huygens’ metasurface consists of cascaded arrays of dual-loop unit cells which incorporate varactor diodes for obtaining the necessary tunability. The versatile scanning capability of the proposed reconfigurable leaky-wave antenna is numerically studied based on full-wave simulations.