High-Scanning-Rate and Wide-Angle Leaky-Wave Antennas Based on Glide-Symmetry Goubau Line

A glide-symmetry Goubau line leaky-wave antenna for achieving both high scanning rate and wide scanning angle range is introduced. The novelty of the design is its combination of glide symmetry and a single-layer Goubau line. This combination leads to performance enhancement in both scanning rate and scanning angle range. Utilizing a corrugated Goubau line in a glide-symmetry fashion closes its stopband at the cutoff frequency while slowing down its group velocity. As the dispersion around the closed stopband is shifted to the fast-wave region by periodic profile modulation, the space harmonics exhibit high-scanning-rate radiation. In conjunction with this, the single-layer nature of the Goubau line allows the beam to scan from nearly endfire to backfire directions, leading to a wide scanning angle range. Numerical examples and experimental validation are provided to validate the proposed design. These show that the proposed antenna exhibits dual-band operation, where one band scans 152 degrees within 2.2 GHz (corresponding to scanning rate of 69 degrees/GHz) with 67% efficiency, while the second band scans 145 degrees within 0.7 GHz (corresponding to scanning rate of 207 degrees/GHz) with 26% efficiency. A tradeoff between scanning rate and efficiency always exists in high-scanning-rate leaky-wave antennas. One is able to freely choose the preferred scanning rate in this single antenna. A comparison with other related works shows that the proposed antenna exhibits the best performance.