ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses modal properties of layered structures composed by metamaterials and their basic applications in waveguiding and radiating devices. The study of modal properties of layered structures characterized by possibly negative effective parameters has been a topic of interest since the 1960s. The basic analysis just presented for surface waves in metamaterial slabs can be useful to argue novel behaviors also in other guiding structures: among them, we illustrate some interesting features concerning metamaterial nonradiative dielectric (NRD) waveguides. In standard NRD guides, the unimodal operation band can negatively be limited not only by the presence of higher-order modes of the same LSM type, but also by the possible excitation of additional above-cutoff modes of LSE type. Alternative field representations can be obtained by performing different deformations of the original integration path along the real axis.