A Broadband Bessel Beam Launcher Using Metamaterial Lens

An approach of generating broadband Bessel beams is presented. The broadband Bessel beams are produced by a gradient index (GRIN) metamaterial lens illuminated by broadband waveguide antenna. The metamaterial lens is constructed with multi-layered structure and each layer is composed of GRIN metamaterials. The metamaterials are designed as dielectric plates printed with metallic patterns in the center region and drilled by air holes near the edge, which operate in wide band. The metamaterial lens serves as a convertor which transforms the spherical beams emitted from feed into conical beams. The conical beams form quasi-Bessel beams in the near-field region. The aperture diameter of the GRIN lens is much larger than the operating wavelength to guarantee the transformation. In principle, this kind of metamaterial lens can produce Bessel beams at arbitrary distance by designing the refractive-index distribution. To verify the approach, we have designed, fabricated and tested a metamaterial lens. Full-wave simulation and experiment results have proved that the generated Bessel beams can be maintained in distance larger than 1 meter within a ranging from 12 GHz to 18 GHz.