Reply to 'Comments on 'Application of Double Negative Materials to Increase the Power Radiated by Electrically Small Antennas''

摘要

I would like to thank Prof. Kildal for his interest in our work. However, I respectfully disagree with his comments on our reported results on several levels. I explain these below. In [1], we were considering the performance of an infinitesimal electric dipole antenna (i.e., a given infinitesimal current source) surrounded by a double negative (DNG) metamaterial shell. To describe the performance of this system, and in particular the effect of the DNG shell, we needed to compare the radiation property of this system with that of the same infinitesimal dipole without the DNG shell. As a quantitative measure for such comparison we took the ratio of the total power radiated by our DNG-shell-surrounded source to the power radiated by the same infinitesimal radiating current source in free space. In other words, the sources in both cases were ideal infinitesimal current dipoles driven with the same time-varying current value. We denoted this ratio by the term "radiated power gain." We emphasized the adjective "radiated" because we were discussing both the reactive and radiated powers throughout the paper and wanted to make a clear distinction on what quantity was being reported. Since the term was defined explicitly in the paper to avoid any confusion, I do not believe the term could be considered misleading.