Directivity Enhancement to Vivaldi Antennas Using Compactly Anisotropic Zero-Index Metamaterials

The traditional Vivaldi antenna has an ultrawide bandwidth, but low directivity. To enhance the directivity, we propose a high-gain Vivaldi antenna based on compactly anisotropic zero-index metamaterials (ZIM). Such anisotropic ZIM are designed and fabricated using resonant meander-line structures, which are integrated with the Vivaldi antenna smoothly and hence have compact size. Measurement results show that the directivity and gain of the Vivaldi antenna have been enhanced significantly in the designed bandwidth of anisotropic ZIM (9.5-10.5 GHz), but not affected in other frequency bands (2.5-9.5 GHz and 10.5-13.5 GHz).