Ka-band modulated metasurface antennas fabricated by metal additive manufacturing

Metasurface (MTS) antennas present an equivalent modulated reactance tensor in the aperture plane, which is designed to gradually radiate a surface-wave (SW). The modulation results in the (-1) indexed Floquet mode entering the visible region, thus becoming a leaky-wave (LW) mode with curvilinear phase-contour. In this paper, we explore the use of metallic MTSs to synthesize the reactance tensor required to obtain an objective radiation pattern, with a given shape and polarization. The proposed structure is particularly well suited to fabrication by metal additive manufacturing. We have designed several metallic MTS antennas, verifying their performance by full-wave simulations. We have also fabricated a prototype, and the measurements have validated the simulation results.