Gigabit per Second Data Transfer in High-Gain Metamaterial Structures at 60 GHz

While much metamaterial research has concentrated on the exotic physical properties of metamaterial structures and their potential applications, there has been little reported on the usefulness of these metamaterial structures in actual applications, for example, in communications systems. Moreover, since many metamaterials are designed for operation at very specific frequencies, there are reasonable concerns for how they will act when they are applied to high-data-rate systems. This paper takes a zero-n grid structure that has been shown previously to produce high directivity in the microwave regime, and demonstrates its usefulness for real wireless data transfer in the millimeter-wave regime. The design frequency is selected to be 60 GHz, where there is a large swath of worldwide available bandwidth. An improvement in the overall system gain with no degradation of its gigabit per second data transfer is demonstrated.