Basic Properties of Checkerboard Metasurfaces

This letter presents a new type of metasurface, which consists of a checkerboard-type layout, made of electrically small complementary metallic patches and apertures. Depending on whether the patches' vertices are interconnected or not, the structure may or may not support a propagating quasi-TEM mode. This feature offers the possibility of designing arbitrary transmission line paths on the checkerboard metasurface (CBMS) by dynamically changing the vertex connections. An equivalent network model is proposed for the CBMS transmission line and validated through simulated and experimental results. Furthermore, a preliminary experiment with a CBMS transmission line printed on a semiconductor substrate shows the possibility of reconfiguring the metasurface by photon injection.