A general representation of left-handed materials using LC-loaded transmission lines.

LC-loaded transmission lines and composite right/left-handed (CRLH) LC circuits have been applied to generate equivalent left-handed materials (LHM). In this paper, we propose a general representation of LHM using the mixture of CRLH circuits and transmission lines, along with the corresponding design formulations. The proposed structure can be easily used to produce an equivalent medium with the permittivity -ℇ0 and permeability -μ0 consisting of a small loss and retardation, which cannot be realized by previous structures with the microstrip lines in practice. This is very important to verify some LHM experiments such as the LHM superlens and electromagnetic-wave localization. Circuit simulations have been conducted to test the validity of the general structure. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 48: 2167–2171, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.21883 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]