Effects of Spatial Dispersion on Reflection From Mushroom-Type Artificial Impedance Surfaces

In a spatially dispersive medium, the electric dipole moment of an inclusion cannot be related to the macroscopic electric field through a local relation. Several recent works have emphasized the role of spatial dispersion in wire media, and demonstrated that arrays of parallel metallic wires may behave very differently from a uniaxial local material with negative permittivity. Here, we investigate the effect of spatial dispersion on reflection properties of the mushroom structure introduced by Sievenpiper, based on local and nonlocal homogenization methods. The objective of this paper is to clarify the role of spatial dispersion in the mushroom structure and demonstrate that, under some conditions, it is suppressed. The metamaterial substrate, or meta-surface is modeled as a wire medium covered with an impedance surface. Surprisingly, it is found that, in such a configuration, the effects of spatial dispersion may be nearly suppressed when the slab is electrically thin, and that the wire medium can be modeled very accurately using a local model.