Microwave metamaterial microstrip line with enhanced refractive index and its application to compact a Wilkinson power divider

A new microwave metamaterial microstrip line (meta-MSL) is studied by integrating planar mushroom metamaterial structures into a conventional MSL. The meta-MSL is featured with an enhanced effective refractive index than the conventional, extracted from numerical demonstrations using the S-parameter method. The extraordinarily increased refractive index is found to be associated with weak dispersion and low dissipation loss, making the meta-MSL particularly beneficial to compact a microwave Wilkinson power divider (WPD). One metamaterial WPD (meta-WPD) is built using new meta-MSLs. Full-wave numerical calculations reveal that the new meta-WPD has low insertion losses, low reflections, and high isolations between the output ports, working as a good substitute for the conventional WPD. However, the new meta-WPD is exceptional in its small size, which is particularly useful in mobile and wireless applications where compact microwave components are in critical demand.