High Gain Holographic Antenna with
a Novel Metallic Lens
Jinlin Liu, Tao Su
National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Antennas and Microwaves
Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China.
Abstract-A planar holographic antenna with novel metallic
lens and straight strips is presented in this paper. The proposed
holographic antenna utilizes surface wave launcher (SWL) as the
surface wave excitation. The metallic lens consists of small
rectangles arranged based on the surface refractive index of the
unit cell. The spherical surface wave excited by SWL can be
transformed to plane wave when passing through the metallic
lens. Metallic straight strips are employed to achieve leaky wave
radiation. Far field beam pattern results suggest that gain value
of the main beam is as high as 18.37 dBi at 11.5 GHz. A good
agreement between EM simulated and measured results
evidently validates the proposed holographic antenna.
I. INTRODUCTION
The holographic antenna has attracted considerable interests
in wireless communication system owing to its high gain, low
profile and compatibility with backend circuits. The technique
to control the surface wave (SW) is of primary concern. A
variety of efficient methods have been proposed to control SW
effects.
In [1], a theoretical method is proposed for examining the
characteristics of SW scattering from a periodic strip array on
a grounded dielectric slab, which can be applied for both TM
and TE polarization. Printed surface wave launcher (SWL)
and metallic grating lenses are employed to excite and control
TM polarized SW in [2] and [3]. Furthermore, by the addition
of metallic strips, a high gain leaky-wave antenna is presented
in [4]. A holographic antenna inspired structure is presented
for patch antenna application in [5], which is obtained by
using dual phase-shifting metallic dipoles to control SW. In
[6], a Rotman-lens is embedded in the holographic antenna
system to achieve 2D beam scanning. A beam reconfigurable
leaky-wave antenna using periodic water grating is presented
in [7]. In [8] and [9], subwavelength impedance modulation
metasurface is utilized to transform SW to circularly polarized
leaky wave.
Here, a new design of holographic antenna is presented. The
antenna features high gain value and reduced size with novel
metallic lens and twelve straight strips. The metallic lens can
be used to improve directivity of the surface wave. It is
composed of numerous small rectangles arranged in certain
order. Spherical surface wave excited by SWL can be
transformed to plane wave when passing through the metallic
lens. By putting straight strips in the properly distance from
the lens, cylindrical leaky wave can be excited. The peak gain
value of the antenna is as high as 18.37 dBi at 11.5 GHz. To
978-1-5386-2416-6/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
further explain the proposed holographic antenna
experimentally, the simulated antenna is fabricated. The
measured results show good agreement with the simulated
ones.
II. THEORETICAL CONSIDERRATIONS
SWLs are adopted in this paper to generate surface waves.
Coplanar wave guide transmission line is used to feed SWL.
The sketch map of the proposed holographic antenna is shown
in Fig. 1. The antenna is designed in only single substrate
layer. Metallic lens and strips are designed on the top side and
SWL is on the opposite side. The size of the proposed antenna
is 100 mm × 200 mm × 2.5 mm and relative permittivity of
the substrate is εr = 9.8. The design process is demonstrated as
follows.
A. Surface Wave Launcher and the Lens
[10-11] show uni-planar compact coplanar-waveguide-fed
SWL for leaky wave antenna applications. SWL, as one of
surface excitations, can excite TM polarized surface waves. It
can be a compact way to generate surface wave for this kind
of leaky antennas. Compared with antennas fed by horn,
antenna fed by SWL is easier to assemble with other devices.
Fig. 2 shows the structure of the SWL. It is composed of a
main slot, secondary slots and the tunning slots. The main slot
is used to radiate energy, two secondary slots are used as
reflector and four tunning slots are employed for impedance
matching [12]. SWL plays a role as the magnetic dipole
source. The energy is coupled to the planar metallic lens, and
then energy radiates outward with the lens and metallic strips.
The optimized dimensions shown in Fig. 2 are given as
follows (all in mm): w1 = 1, w2 = 0.43, w3 = 0.6, w4 = 0.2, w5 =
0.2, w6 = 0.45, w7 = 0.85, l1 =0.92, l2 = 5.4, l3 = 1.3, l4 =1.92, l5
= 1.5, l6 = 3.61.
Figure 1. Sketch map of the proposed holographic antenna.

Figure 2. The structure of SWL.
Figure 3. Transmission phases of the unit cell under different width s.
As shown in Fig. 1, metallic lens is employed to transform
spherical surface wave excited by SWL to planar wave. A
subwavelength metallic square patch is adopted as the basic
unit cell of the metallic lens. Certain numbers of small
rectangles is arranged in certain order. The structure of basic
unit cell is shown in Fig. 3. The black part is a square patch
and the gray part is grounded dielectric slab.
Phase differences are essential to realize the surface-wave
metallic lens. So it is important to obtain the phase differences
of different size of square patches. As the size of square
patches changed slowly and by gradient, the periodic
boundary condition and eigenmode solver was adopted in CST
Microwave Studio. It can be seen from Fig. 3 that with size of
the square patches changed, different phase differences of
surface wave can be obtained. In this paper, the period of the
square patch is d = 2.4 mm, and the size of square patch
changes from s = 0.2 mm to s = 2 mm.
For manipulating the surface wave front, refractive index of
the metallic lens is only under considered in this paper. The
surface refractive index n of the square patches can be
calculated by
c k c ϕc
n= = t = (1)
vt wt awt
where c is the speed of light in free space, vt is phase velocity
of surface wave, kt is wave number and wt is angular
frequency. And φ = kta is one of phase differences of
boundary of the air box in certain frequency.
The surface refractive index distribution of metallic lens
should have the form of
y
nm = − + n0 ( y < L / 2) (2)
W
where W is the width of the metallic lens, L is the length of the
lens, n0 = 2.6 is the central surface refractive index. With the
analysis above, when the spherical surface wave passes
through the metallic lens and then reaches the other end of the
lens, the phase in surface wave propagating direction is
basically identical ， similarly the same variation comes to
refractive indexes. Correspondingly, plane waves are finally
realized. Based on the analysis above, the proposed planar
metallic lens is shown in Fig. 4. The size of the metallic lens is
86.4 mm ×28.4 mm.
Figure 4. Structure of the planar metallic lens.
B. Design of Metallic Strips
Periodic metallic straight strips are employed to obtain
leaky wave radiation. The structure of the periodic metallic
straight strips is shown in Fig. 5. The off broadside angle θ
can be calculated as
β0 λ
θ ≈ sin −1 (− 0) (3)
k0 pr
where k0 and λ0 are the wavenumber and wavelength in free
space, β0 is the phase constant of the n = 0 spatial harmonic
and pr is the period of the metallic straight strips [13].
The distance of the mth strips from SWL, d(m), can be
defined as
d (m) = d 0 + (m − 1) pr (4)
where d0 = 34.3 mm and pr = 14.5 mm for the holographic
antenna design proposed in this paper. The width of the
metallic straight strips is optimized to be w = 2.5 mm.
Two rectangular patches which located above the SWL are
benefit to decrease the backward radiation. The length of the
rectangular patch is l1 = 30 mm, the width is w1 = 5.5 mm. The
distance between the metallic lens and straight strips is s = 2.9
mm. By combination of properly placed SWL, metallic lens
and the straight strips, a pencil-shaped radiation beam can be
obtained.
Figure 5. The proposed holographic antenna with lens and straight strips.
 -5
Measured index of the metallic lens, the spherical surface wave excited
-10 dB
Simulate by SWL can be transformed to plane wave. Metallic straight
-10
strips are employed to achieve leaky wave radiation. The
-15
holographic antenna achieves a measured peak gain of 18 dBi
at 11.5 GHz. The size of the propose antenna is 3.84λg ×
7.69λg.
S11(dB)

-20

-25
-30
-35
11.0 11.2 11.4 11.6 11.8 12.0
Frequency(GHz)
Figure 6. Simulated and measured S11 of the proposed holographic antenna.
(a) (b)
Figure 7. |Eθ (θ=23º, φ)| Radiation patterns at 11.5 GHz in the quasi
(a) yoz plane (b) xoz plane.
III. RESULTS
To verify the above analysis, we fabricate the proposed
holographic antenna. The photograph of the fabricated antenna
is shown in Fig. 6. To clearly show the performances of the
holographic antenna, the S11 parameter is also shown in Fig. 6.
It can be seen that the reflection losses are less than -10 dB
from 11 GHz to 12 GHz.
The radiation patterns of the proposed holographic antenna
at 11.5 GHz are shown in Fig. 7. Fig. 7 (a) shows the radiation
pattern in yoz plane (with and without lens). Fig. 7 (b) shows
the radiation pattern in xoz plane (with and without lens). It
can be seen that the measured radiation pattern agrees with the
simulated one well. The measured peak gain value is 0.3 dB
lower than the simulated one. The discrepancies between
simulated and measured results may be caused by fabrication
errors, the variation of material properties and extra loss of the
SMA connectors. The size of the propose antenna is 3.84λg ×
7.69λg, where λg is the guided wavelength at 11.5 GHz.
IV. CONCLUSION
A novel holographic antenna is presented here. The
holographic antenna is composed of SWL, novel metallic lens
and straight strips. The metallic lens consists of small
rectangles, which are arranged based on the surface refractive
index of the unit cell. By controlling the surface refractive
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