Application of the transmission line theory of left-handed (LH) materials to the realization of a microstrip "LH line"

Left-handed (LH) materials, first introduced theoretically in Veselago (1968), have spurred considerable excitement since the demonstration of their practical realizability. The unique properties of these metamaterials, verified by full-wave analysis in Caloz et al. (2001), are promising for a diversity of optical/microwave applications, such as new types of beam steerers, modulators, band-pass filters, superlenses, microwave couplers and antenna radomes. However, the LH structures presented so far are impractical for microwave applications, because of their too narrow bandwidth and too lossy characteristics, and alternative theories are desirable to gain a deeper insight into their behavior. We introduce here a transmission line (TL) approach of LH materials (Caloz et al. 2002), provide a method to realize an artificial lumped-element LH-TL and propose a microstrip implementation of this line.