Beam Scanning Antenna Enabled by a Spatially Reconfigurable Near-Zero Index Metamaterial

High-gain metamaterial lens antennas offer significant advantages for the construction of compact, high-efficiency, and lightweight antenna systems. Many such antennas use a homogeneous slab of uniaxial Zero-Index Metamaterial (ZIM) to perform the collimation due to the relative simplicity of design and construction, as the radiation pattern is set merely by the shape of the ZIM slab. As an extension to this concept, a dynamically reconfigurable metamaterial may be used to create an antenna capable of real-time solid-state beamforming. By switching regions of a cylindrical lens between near-ZIM and near-free-space conditions, the effective shape of the ZIM and thus the direction and relative magnitude of the beams in the azimuthal plane are controlled. Elevation plane scanning is also possible by stacking several such lenses with identical feed magnitude and phase to form an array and controlling the pattern with the spatially-distributed metamaterial state.