ABSTRACT A NOVEL TRANSPORT BASED MODEL FOR WIRE MEDIA AND ITS APPLICATION TO SCATTERING PROBLEMS

Artificially engineered materials, known as metamaterials, have attracted the interest of researchers because of the potential for novel applications. Effective modeling of meta-materials is a crucial step for analyzing and synthesizing devices. In this thesis, we focus on wire medium (both isotropic and uniaxial) and validate a novel transport based model for them. Scattering problems involving wire media are computationally intensive due to the spa-tially dispersive nature of homogenized wire media. However, it will be shown that using the new model to solve scattering problems can simplify the calculations a great deal. For scattering problems, an integro-differential equation based on a transport formulation is proposed instead of the convolution-form integral equation that directly comes from spatial dispersion. The integro-differential equation is much faster to solve than the con-volution equation form, and its effectiveness is confirmed by solving several examples in one-, two-, and three-dimensions. Both the integro-differential equation formulation and the homogenized wire medium parameters are experimentaly confirmed. To do so, several isotropic connected wire medium spheres have been fabricated using a rapid-prototypin