Steerable millimetre-wave plasmonic antenna with elliptical slots

In this work, steerable millimetre-wave plasmonic antenna is presented. The proposed antenna is designed using slit grating structure that comprises of single sub-wavelength slit enclosed by periodic symmetrical grooves that increase the antenna´s gain. The plasmonic antenna´s beam is steered by introducing elliptical slots on the antenna´s surface. The elliptical slots not only steer the antenna´s beam, but they also increase the antenna´s gain. The antenna beam angle can be steered from -20° to +20° over the operation bandwidth which is 2.06GHz. The steerable millimetre-wave plasmonic antenna is flat, thin and light and it is characterized by an overall thickness of 1.2mm, that corresponds to around 0.25λ at the resonance frequency. The proposed antenna resonates at 61.54GHz and it achieves a gain of 12.55dB with a low side lobe level of 5.6 dB at resonance frequency.