The giant optical activity of chiral metamaterials (CMMs) holds great potential for tailoring the polarization state of an electromagnetic (EM) wave. In controlling the polarization state, the aspect of asymmetric transmission (AT), where a medium allows the EM radiation to pass through in one direction while restricting it in the opposite direction, adds additional degrees of freedom such as one-way channelling functionality. In this work, a CMM formed by a pair of mutually twisted slanted complementary metal strips is realized for broadband AT accompanied with cross-polarization (CP) conversion for linearly polarized EM waves. Numerically, the proposed ultra-thin (∼λ/42) CMM shows broadband AT from 8.58 GHz to 9.73 GHz (bandwidth of 1.15 GHz) accompanied with CP transmission magnitude greater than 0.9. The transmission and reflection spectra reveal the origin of the asymmetric transmission as the direction sensitive cross polarization conversion and anisotropic electric coupling occurring in the structure which is then elaborated with the surface current analysis and electric field distribution within the structure. An experiment is carried out to verify the broadband AT based CP conversion of the proposed CMM at microwave frequencies, and a reliable agreement between numerical and experimental results is obtained. Being ultra-thin, the reported broadband AT based CP conversion of the proposed CMM is useful for controlling radiation patterns in non-reciprocal EM devices and communication networks.

The ever-increasing interest towards metamaterial absorbers owes to its remarkable features such as ultra-thin nature and design flexibility. Subduing the inherent narrow bandwidth of such absorbers is the prime goal in metamaterial absorber research, as this can widen the applications areas. A greater challenge is to construct bidirectional absorber, which provides direction-insensitive absorption, as most of the existing designs exhibit single sided absorption due to the complete metal film used in the design. This work presents the realization of a bidirectional, bandwidth-enhanced metamaterial absorber with basic elements such as strips and squares optimized to have adjacent resonances leading to a bandwidth-enhanced absorption. The structural evolution of the constituent metallic components towards the formation of bandwidth-enhanced absorption is described. The bidirectional absorber exhibits more than 90% absorption between 13.40 GHz and 14.25 GHz from the two incident directions. The mechanism of absorption is studied with the surface current analysis and the effective parameters of the structure. The choice of the metallic components with four-fold rotation symmetry renders the proposed design to be polarization independent and wide-angle receptive. The numerical studies are verified experimentally at microwave frequencies, which shows a good agreement between them.

Customization of substrates for the design of metamaterial absorbers gives the user a wide choice of parameters like flexibility, thickness, dielectric constant, etc. Polymer composites are attractive in this regard as they provide a variety of options to fabricate substrates with desirable properties depending on the matrix and filler materials. In this work, flexible polymer nanocomposites with different weight percentages of graphene nanoplatelets (GnP) in epoxy were fabricated and the dielectric characterization was performed. The presence of GnP increased the real part of the dielectric constant from 2.5 for 0 wt. % to 14.7 for 9 wt. % of the epoxy-GnP composites measured in X-band frequency. The substrate with 5 wt. % of GnP in epoxy having a relative permittivity of 7.3–j0.25 is chosen to design a metamaterial absorber, and the absorption studies are carried out numerically. The proposed absorber having a thickness of λ/22 is shown to have a maximum absorption of 99.8% at the frequency 9.88 GHz. Furthermore, an equivalent circuit model of the absorber is proposed and the analytical values of the circuit elements are determined. The metamaterial prototype is fabricated by coating metallic resonating structures on top of the flexible E-GnP5 substrate of thickness 1.4 mm by thermal evaporation. The performance of the fabricated absorber agrees well with the simulation results. These polymer nanocomposites with good flexibility, thermal stability, and optimum dielectric properties would be the future materials for developing conformal metamaterial absorbers for microwave applications.

Electromagnetic metamaterial absorbers are an efficient replacement for the conventional absorbers due to their advantages like compact thickness, user control of frequency, etc. This work explores the development of a metamaterial absorber using a specifically synthesized substrate. Compared with commercially available substrate boards, a thoroughly designed substrate provides additional control over the absorber properties as it can have a dielectric constant and loss tangent of choice. This paper introduces a novel ceramic, Ba3Fe10Ti18O54 (BFT), as a substrate for a metamaterial absorber having permittivity, ɛr ∼ 22.3, at X-band frequency. The high dielectric constant results in a miniaturized metamaterial absorber with the dimensions λ/8 × λ/7 × λ/28. The proposed absorber produces 97.4% absorption at 10.65 GHz, which is studied numerically and experimentally. Absorption above 90% for the proposed structure has a bandwidth of 0.75 GHz. The broad nature with a simple topological structure can be attributed to the presence of dielectric and magnetic loss in the substrate. The absorption mechanism is explained with impedance and surface current analysis. Further, absorption characteristics are analyzed with the different thicknesses of the substrate.