A novel broadband fractal metamaterial unit cell

A fractal inspired metamaterial structure based on the electric LC resonator (ELC) described in [1] is presented. The proposed unit cell was built with a larger physical size to shift the frequency of operation to lower frequencies, and a partial repetition of the basic I-shape was inserted in each capacitive gap. The resulting structure was simulated in HFSS, and the relative permittivity and permeability values were extracted from the simulations. The structure was found to have negative permittivity over the range 1.3 GHz - 1.75 GHz, which corresponds to a percent bandwidth of 29.5% with a unit cell that is smaller than λ_o/10.