Study of horn antenna loaded with epsilon-near-zero metamaterial

A new innovative horn antenna loaded with epsilon-near-zero(ENZ) metamaterial for phase compensation and gain enhancement is studied in this paper. The dielectric coating metallic grid with hollow structure was designed and tested based on the principle of antenna aperture phase distribution minimum variance, and an equivalent circuit model of ENZ metamaterial was established for the research of electromagnetic response of the period structure. The experiment results show that the gain has improved 1.8 dB and the aperture efficiency has improved from 0.4 to 0.6, the relative bandwidth is better than 10% by using epsilon-near-zero metamaterial proposed in this paper.