A Six-port Path-reconfigurable Circulator Based On Y-type Plasma Photonic Crystals

The circulator is an anisotropic microwave device,which is widely used in radar,microwave communication,wireless communication,and radio frequency front-end parts of wireless local area network systems to achieve duplexing.Traditional circulators are made of ferrite materials,mostly three ports,with few paths and are not reconfigurable.Photonic crystals are widely used in microwave devices because of their unique characteristics of artificially controlling electromagnetic waves.Plasma materials can control the space-time tunability of electromagnetic wave propagation in different wavelength bands.Combining plasma materials with photonic crystal structures has the advantage of more flexible tuning of photonic crystal band gaps than ferrite materials.Based on the theoretical knowledge and properties of plasma photonic crystals,a six-port reconfigurable circulator based on plasma photonic crystals is designed and simulated using COMSOL Multiphysics software.This circulator has six ports and five different paths when incident on the same port.The path can be reconstructed by changing the direction of the applied magnetic field.The finite element method(FEM)is used to derive and analyze the propagation equation of electromagnetic waves in a two-dimensional photonic crystal.The photonic bandgap range is obtained.The normalized frequency is 0.454-0.538(??/2?c),corresponding to 13.62~16.14 GHz in the microwave band.The insertion losses are-0.8881 dB,-1.058 dB,-1.26 dB,-1.1847 dB and-0.397 dB,respectively.In practical applications,the path reconfigurable circulator has the advantages of space saving,compact structure and higher integration.