Nonlinear Power-Dependent Impedance Surface

Impedance surfaces are artificially designed periodic structures that support surface waves. This paper presents a novel concept of a nonlinear impedance surface, whose impedance increases with the surface wave power. The proposed surface consists of a lattice of modified slotted mushroom-like cells loaded with varactor diodes and lumped circuits. The circuits are designed to sense the incoming surface wave power and feed back the signal to control the bias of the varactors, which eventually tunes the surface impedance. Such proposed power-dependent impedance surface has been demonstrated by a prototype consisting of 4 × 10 cells. It is observed from the experiments that as the power varies from 16 to 27 dBm, the surface exhibits a surface impedance range as much as j385 to j710 Ω. This characteristic enables the surface to be potentially useful in self-trapping surface-wave waveguide, power-dependent beam-steering antenna reflector, and other nonlinear applications.