Derivation and general properties of artificial lossless balanced composite right/left-handed transmission lines of arbitrary order

Abstract

A circuit theory-based approach for systematically deriving all possible lossless balanced composite right/left-handed transmission lines is described. To illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approach, novel artificial transmission line unit-cells with tri- and quad-band behaviour are proposed. It is shown that the number of right-handed or left-handed frequency bands exhibited by such transmission lines is determined by the order of its unit-cell. It is explained why artificial lossless balanced transmission lines exhibit a stop-band around each pole of their associated continuous transmission line that can not be closed up. Since this approach allows for the systematic derivation of such transmission line unit-cells of arbitrary order, multi-band components based on metamaterial transmission lines are envisaged.