Tightly coupled tripole conductor pairs as constituents for a planar 2D-isotropic negative refractive index metamaterial.

A metamaterial, arranged by stacking layers of planar constituents suitably shaped to be responsive to arbitrarily linearly polarized incident waves is here shown to exhibit 2D-isotropic effective negative refractive index (NRI). The general concept underlying this metamaterial design consists of closely pairing two metallic particles to accomplish, as a result of their tight coupling, both symmetric and antisymmetric resonance modes, whose proper superposition can lead to an effective negative refraction response. The proposed structure is composed by layers of periodically arranged pairs of face coupled loaded tripoles printed on the opposite sides of a single dielectric substrate. Through a comprehensive characterization of the transmission properties of such metamaterial, together with the analysis of its dispersion diagram, conclusive evidence that the medium exhibits effective NRI properties as well as good impedance matching to free space is provided. We also describe some guidelines to design the proposed metamaterial with a prescribed operational frequency bandwidth, dependently on the structure parameters.