Spoof Plasmon-Based Slow-Wave Excitation of Dielectric Resonator Antennas

A spoof plasmon (SP)-based slow-wave feeding configuration is proposed, experimentally verified and exploited to excite the fundamental horizontally polarized mode of dielectric resonator antennas (DRAs). As an example, a cylindrical DRA operating at 3 GHz is fed by the proposed feeding structure. The simulation and measurement evidence the unique features of TE01δmode such as lower thickness-dependency of the resonant frequencies, superb miniaturization and ultra-compactness, and omnidirectional radiation for horizontally polarized waves. We anticipate that the ground-free SP-based feeding technique could be applied to effectively excite the more “unusual” modes of the isolated DRAs.