IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO.

11, NOVEMBER 2006 585

Dual Composite Right/Left-Handed (D-CRLH)

Transmission Line Metamaterial
Christophe Caloz, Member, IEEE

Abstract—The novel concept of dual composite right/left-handed

(D-CRLH) transmission line metamaterial is introduced. The
D-CRLH is the “dual” of the conventional CRLH in the sense that
it has a series parallel (instead of series) LC tank and a shunt series
(instead of parallel) LC tank. This topological duality results in
dual properties. The D-CRLH indeed exhibits its left-handed (LH)
band at high frequencies and its right-handed (RH) band at low
frequencies and is of stop-band nature, in opposition to the CRLH
which is low-frequency-LH/high-frequency-RH and pass-band.
The so-called balanced condition is still valid in the D-CRLH for
broadband matching. However, phase origin is at dc and infinity Fig. 1. Equivalent circuit model for the D-CRLH transmission line. The sub-
instead, as at the LH-RH transition, and the gap between the RH scripts R and L stand for RH and LH, respectively, and the primes indicate
and LH bands cannot be closed up in practical implementations. per-unit-length RH or times-unit-length LH reactances, related to the per-unit
1
length immittances Z and Y . The incremental length z is much smaller than
In contrast, the D-CRLH provides an unlimited LH bandwidth.
This letter presents the homogeneous and LC-network trans- the guided wavelength  , z1   .
mission parameters and the fundamental dispersion/impedance
properties of the D-CRLH.
Index Terms—Composite right/left-handed (CRLH), dual mentation provides in addition information on the filtering and
CRLH (D-CRLH), left-handed (LH), metamaterials, right-handed bandage effects.
(RH), transmission lines. The most fundamental property of the D-CRLH can be in-
ferred from the following observation in connection with the im-
pedances , and the admittances
I. INTRODUCTION , . At low frequencies,
and , so that the dominant components are and
OMPOSITE right/left-handed (CRLH) tranmission line
C metamaterial structures have lead to a wealth of novel
electromagnetic concepts and applications [1]. We introduce
and the line is therefore RH. In contrast at high frequencies,

and
and , so that the dominant components are
and the line is therefore LH. The D-CRLH thus ex-
here the “dual” of the CRLH metamaterial prototype, the
hibits a low-frequency RH band and a high-frequency LH band,
dual-CRLH (D-CRLH), and investigate its fundamental prop-
which is opposite to the conventional CRLH behavior.
erties.
As conventional CRLH structures, D-CRLH structures can
be implemented in various planar technologies compatible with
microwave integrated circuits. An example is the microstrip
II. DUAL CRLH TRANSMISSION LINE MEDIUM
DCRLH structure introduced in [2].
Fig. 1 shows the equivalent circuit model for a D-CRLH
transmission line. Its series immittance or impedance is a par- III. UNIFORM D-CRLH MEDIUM
allel LC tank and its shunt immittance or admittance is a series The complex propagation constant , with its attenuation
LC tank. This configuration is thus the dual of the conventional factor and propagation constant , and the complex char-
CRLH [1]. acteristic impedance for a uniform D-CRLH medium
The configuration of Fig. 1 represents both the infinitesimal are obtained by substituting the per-unit-length immittances
circuit model for a uniform D-CRLH medium in the case (Fig. 1)
0 (Section III), or the actual unit cell of an LC
network D-CRLH structure in the case (at least
(1a)
4) with , , ,
(Section IV). While such a uniform medium
is not known to be existing naturally, it provides simple and (1b)
deep insight into the properties of a real D-CRLH structure.
The more involved analysis of the LC network artificial imple-
corresponding to the equivalent constitutive parameters
and , into the expressions
Manuscript received April 11, 2006; revised June 27, 2006. (2a)
The author is with the École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, QC H3T
1J4, Canada (christophe.caloz@polymtl.ca).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2006.884773 (2b)

1531-1309/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE

586 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2006

which is defined identically for the conventional CRLH [1], the

expressions of (3) simplify to

(5a)

(5b)

where the appropriate sign has been chosen for . It is seen that
exhibits a pole at the transition frequency between the RH
and the LH bands, which are connected to each other without a
gap (as in the conventional CRLH). Note also that is a non
frequency-dependent quantity, allowing broadband matching to
50- ports.

IV. LC-NETWORK D-CRLH STRUCTURE

Consider now the practical artificial LC-network implemen-
tation of the ideal uniform D-CRLH transmission line described
in the previous section. Such an implementation requires real
inductors and capacitors , either in chip or
printed form, part of which (especially the RH elements) are
provided by electromagnetic parasitics. The LC-network rep-
resents a good approximation of the uniform medium in a re-
stricted frequency band where electromagnetic uniformity is re-
alized . For optimal transmission characteristics, the
circuit of Fig. 1 is made symmetric ( or with 2 or 2 at
each port, respectively) in practice.
The building-brick inductors and capacitors necessarily
Fig. 2. Characteristics of the (balanced/unbalanced) uniform D-CRLH combine their reactances into resonances at some cutoff
(Section III). (a) Dispersion/attenuation diagram computed by (3a) or frequencies so as to generate stop-bands along with the
(5a). (b) Characteristic impedance computed by (3b) or (5b). The param- pass-bands. The LC-network D-CRLH, as any artificial trans-
eters are L = 5 nH/mm, C = 1 pF/mm, L = 25 hboxnH 1 mm,
C = 2 pF 1 mm (f = 1.59 GHz, f = 2.25 GHz, f = 3.18 GHz, mission line, exhibits therefore filtering properties. While a
Z = 70.71
, Z = 35.36
) for the unbalanced case and L = 2.5 nH/mm, purely RH line, a purely LH line and a conventional CRLH are
C = 1 pF/mm, L = 2.5 nH 1 mm, C = 1 pF 1 mm (f = f = f = low-pass, high-pass and band-pass, respectively, the D-CRLH
3.18 GHz, Z = Z = 50
) for the balanced case. is band-stop in nature. Analogies between transmission line
metamaterial theory and conventional filter theory [3] can
naturally be drawn. It must be realized that if a transmission
This yields line metamaterial is always a filter, the converse is not true:
conventional filters are generally not electromagnetically uni-
form structures, whereas uniformity is an essential requirement
for metamaterial effects (such as, e.g., LH or negative refrac-
tive index (NRI) focusing [4]), and do therefore not exhibit
(3a) metamaterial properties. However, the exotic properties of
metamaterials structures may be exploited in the design of
novel types of filters, where the range of operation extends
beyond the metamaterial frequency range [5].
The stop-band cutoff frequencies of the D-CRLH can be com-
puted from the local impedance following the procedure de-
(3b) tailed in [1, Section III-B5]. The result is

where is a sign function ( 1) which is known from the con-

siderations of Section II to be positive (RH) in the low frequency
branch and negative (LH) in the high frequency branch of the (6a)
dispersion relation. Examination of reveals that
and 0, which provides a convenient means to
identify unambiguously and from observation of the
function. (6b)
In the so-called balanced case
where the sign is for the LH high-pass cutoff and the
(4) sign is for the RH low-pass cutoff , and where we note that
CALOZ: D-CRLH TRANSMISSION LINE METAMATERIAL 587

where it appears that 0 . This

indicates that a gap between the RH and LH ranges, resulting
from the filtering cutoff effects of the LC implementation, is
always present in a practical D-CRLH structure, since the reac-
tances indicated in the above limit for closure of the gap cannot
be attained in practice.
For both computational (Floquet theory) and fabrication
(simplicity) convenience, metamaterial structures are generally
made periodic. The periodic analysis given in [1, Section
III-B6] could be applied here in a straight forward manner, but
it is omitted as it is not essential to our discussion.

V. DISPERSION, IMPEDANCE AND FILTERING ANALYSIS

Fig. 2 shows typical dispersion/attenuation diagrams and
characteristic impedance curves for the uniform D-CRLH
(Section III). In the unbalanced case, a gap, delimited by the
resonances and , exists between the low-frequency RH
band and the high-frequency LH band; in the stop-band the
characteristic impedance is imaginary and the attenuation ex-
hibits poles at and [see (3a)]. In the balanced case, the
gap width shrinks to zero, as a consequence of the fact that
and merge into the transition frequency , but the func-
tion is discontinuous at ; in addition, the impedance is
purely real and non frequency-dependent, allowing broadband
matching.
Fig. 3 shows characteristics of the LC-network implementa-
tion of the uniform D-CRLH of Fig. 2. The most striking dif-
ference is that the gap between the RH and LH bands is not
delimited any more by and , but by the cutoff frequen-
cies and , which always follow the sequence
. Consequently,
in contrast to the conventional CRLH, the D-CRLH always ex-
hibits a gap between the RH and LH bands, even in the balanced
case. While the D-CRLH does not possess the balanced gap-less
infinite- property of the conventional CRLH, it provides com-
plementary properties with dc and unlimitedly (in theory, ig-
noring parasitics) high-frequency propagation.

VI. CONCLUSION
A D-CRLH transmission line materamaterial medium has
been introduced and characterized. This medium has been
Fig. 3. Characteristics of the LC-network (N = 10 unit cells) D-CRLH shown to represent the dual nature of the conventional CRLH
(Section IV) with the same parameters as in Fig. 2 with z 1 = 1 mm. and to exhibit interesting complementary properties. It will
(a) S -parameters, unbalanced case (f = 1.48 GHz, f = 1.59 GHz, soon be implemented in planar integrated microwave circuit
f = 2.25 GHz, f = 3.18 GHz, f = 3.43 GHz). (b) S -parameters,
unbalanced case (f = 2.49 GHz, f = = f f = 3.18 GHz, f = configurations and give rise to novel applications.
4.08 GHz). (c) Dispersion curve (balanced and unbalanced) obtained by
 =[ ' ( )+2
S ]1 ( )
m  = z m 2 . These curves differ from REFERENCES
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