On the Use of Half-Cut Elements for Single-Layer Wideband Reflectarrays

This letter presents a wideband reflectarray antenna employing half-cut elements. By cutting the original unit cell in half and optimizing the important structural parameters, a linear phase response similar to that of the original structure is obtained. By using the half-cut technique, the array aperture can accommodate twice as much as that of the original elements, resulting in an improved performance. The reflectarray based on half-cut elements demonstrates a satisfactory behavior experimentally, with a bandwidth of 31% for a 1 dB gain drop and a 62.7% peak aperture efficiency. Particularly, compared with the reflectarray using the original elements, the proposed array can realize a superior behavior such as a broader gain bandwidth.