Conceptual design of a beam steering lens through transformation electromagnetics

In this paper, based on transformation electromagnetics, the design procedure of a lens antenna, which steers the radiated beam of a patch array, is presented. Laplace's equation is adopted to construct the mapping between the virtual space and the physical space. The two dimensional (2D) design method can be extended to a potential three-dimensional (3D) realization, and with a proper parameter simplification, the lens can be further realized by common metamaterials or isotropic graded refractive index (GRIN) materials. Full wave simulations are performed to validate the proposed concept. It is observed that by placing the lens on a feeding source, we are able to steer the radiation emitted by the latter source. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America