Slotted Spoof Surface Plasmons for Millimeter Pencil-Beam Generation and Steering

A low-profile approach for pencil-beam generation and steering based on spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SSPPs) and periodically arranged slots is proposed in this paper. Stemming from domino plasmons, we initially analyzed the interaction between linear slots array and domino plasmons after designing a domino plasmon waveguide with two standard rectangle waveguide ports. The results reveal the presence of a fan-beam with frequency-controlled scanning properties across an ultrawide band. Notably, the pervasive open stop band (OSB) effect, which typically poses challenges for broadside radiation leaky wave antennas, is thoroughly considered and effectively mitigated through our dual-slot configuration. Furthermore, we proposed a pencil-beam domino plasmon antenna integrated with a two-stage power divider, the pencil-beam emerges from 45 GHz to 65 GHz with mainbeam direction rotates from 205.4° to 131.8°, the peak gain reaches 21.6 dBi and the beam width is around 12.2°x5.6°. As an unprecedented strategy, this work surmounts the bottleneck of 2D-array based on SSPPs by introducing a high-efficiency integrated power-divider. This approach holds promise as a heuristic method for the generation and manipulation of pencil-beams in millimeter wave band.