A wide band left handed material with high transmission

In this study, we propose guidelines to optimize the transmission and bandwidth of left handed materials (LHM) composed of two-dimensional lattice of metallic wires interleaved with double split ring resonators (SRRs). Several LHM structures are fabricated to test the proposed rules of design and operate between 7 and 14 GHz. In a first step, we show that adding extra SRR layers within each period of wire layers (i.e. interleaving the wire lattice with several SRR lattices) increases the transmittance of the material. In a second step, we demonstrate that adding extra SRR layers in a non-equidistant manner (i.e. inserting several SRR lattices shifted one another by different distances) widens the LHM frequency bandwidth. The results of experimental characterization are found to be in excellent agreement with theoretical predictions. A LHM behavior is obtained in a wide frequency band of ∼1 GHz around 8.2 GHz with a transmission of −1.2 dB measured at resonance. The negative refraction of the material is verified from measurements at oblique incidence.