Active left-handed material collaborated with microwave varactors

In the present letter, a design for active left-handed material collaborated with microwave varactors is proposed and experimentally realized. Both the results of simulation and experiment verify the tunable left-handed properties of the structure in microwave band. A controllable beam steering is then observed experimentally by a prism fabricated by such metamaterial. The simplicity of the active design and its tunable negative refraction indices make it useful for various applications. (C) 2007 American Institute of Physics.