Conformal Leaky-Wave Antenna with Scanning Beam Based on Spoof Surface Plasmon Polaritons

This paper presents a conformal leaky-wave antenna with scanning beam based on spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SSPPs). By utilizing the SSPPs to slow-wave propagation, the rectangular patch units distributed on two staggered layers are used as the radiating structure, and the scanning beam of the conformal leaky-wave antenna is achieved by controlling the on/off state of the PIN diodes on the units. Through simulation analysis, it is found that the antenna operates in the frequency band of 4.2 GHz to 5.5 GHz, and at the frequency of 5.4 GHz, it can achieve beam scanning at multiple angles in the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\varphi$</tex> direction at <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\theta=90^{\circ}$</tex>, with a side lobe level lower than -5dB and a realized gain of around 10dBi. The conformal antenna is suitable for operation on curved surfaces such as cylinders.