A wideband circularly polarized reflectarray using novel Pancharatnam‐Berry phase elements

Abstract A wideband circularly polarized reflectarray using novel single layer multi‐resonant Pancharatnam‐Berry (PB) phase elements is proposed. The unit cell consists of an I‐shaped structure and two parallel rectangular patches that generate and regulate three plasmonic resonances, which realizes broadband circular polarization (CP) maintaining reflection from 8.8 to 16 GHz. By gradually rotating the element structures, 360° phase shifts providing reflected phase in different units can be achieved due to the attractive characteristic of PB phase elements. To verify the performance of this design, a prototype of reflectarray with 41 × 41 elements is fabricated and measured. The experimental results indicate that the reflectarray has an excellent performance in terms of 66.9% 3‐dB axial ratio bandwidth, 30.5% 1‐dB gain bandwidth, 53.8% 3‐dB gain bandwidth and 52.1% peak aperture efficiency at 12.5 GHz. The design can be a promising candidate for satellite communication applications.