Design of Compact and High Directive Slot Antennas Using Grounded Metamaterial Slab

In this letter, a simple and compact approach for directivity enhancement of slot antenna using a grounded metamaterial slab is proposed. This approach has been applied in two different configurations. In the first configuration, two dielectric layers are used for designing antenna and metamaterial slab. Despite the directivity enhancement, an improved bandwidth of about 10.74% is obtained for this configuration. It is also shown that, over the whole working band, a significant broadside directivity improvement is maintained compared to the unloaded slot. In the second configuration, only a single layer of dielectric is used for designing both antenna and metamaterial slab. Thus, in this case, the total thickness of the loaded antenna is noticeably reduced to 0.5 mm, or 0.014 λ0 at resonance.