CEM and Microwave Devices and Antennas

Computational electromagnetics (CEM) is a well-stablished discipline that allows predicting the behavior of electromagnetic waves as they propagate through a medium, are radiated to free-space, or interact with matter. Even though there are numerous full-wave commercial tools able to analyze and design microwave and optical devices and antennas, the developing of home-made numerical techniques still brings important benefits, including providing physical insight to the electromagnetic response of novel structures, the analysis of unusual guiding or radiative phenomena that cannot be currently handled by commercial software, or significantly reducing the computational cost required for the design of complex devices. In this regard, we have proposed novel Green’s functions to simulate hyperbolic metasurfaces and to compute the spontaneous emission rate of emitters located nearby, while taken into account complex phenomena such as the nonlocality of the composing materials. In addition, we have developed mode-matching techniques to analyze leaky-wave antennas [4], and we have incorporated novel spatial Green’s functions into integral equation formulations for the extremely fast and accurate analysis of multilayered planar circuits encapsulated within arbitrarily-shaped boxes.

The physical insight provided by our numerical techniques has allowed us to propose, analyze, design and fabricate novel devices and antennas with enhanced performance compared to the previous state of the art, and to translate and apply phenomena usually found in optics into the microwave regime. For instance, we proposed the novel hybrid waveguide-microstrip filter technology (see Panel a), which is light, compact, low-loss and presents important advantages for the space industry, and we have developed novel transversal filters based on broadside coupling (see Panel b). In addition, we have proposed novel leaky-wave antennas with pencil-beam scanning functionalities [4, 9] (see Panel c) and we derived the analytical conditions that general periodic antennas must fulfill to radiate at broadside. Furthermore, we have demonstrated several novel optically-inspired phenomena and applications at microwaves based on the dispersion engineering concept, including the spatio-temporal Talbot effect (see Panel d) and pulse shaping devices. 

More recently,  we have applied these approaches to proposed new filters able to exhibit enhanced capabilities, such as increasing the multipactor break or provide a much larger bandwidth. In this line, we have also explored reflectarray antennas and connect their analysis with filter theory.