Fractal Metamaterial Absorber with Three-Order Oblique Cross Dipole Slot Structure and its Application for In-band RCS Reduction of Array Antennas

To miniaturize the perfect metamaterial absorber, a fractal three-order oblique cross dipole slot structure is proposed and investigated in this paper. The fractal perfect metamaterial absorber (FPMA) consists of two metallic layers separated by a lossy dielectric substrate. The top layer etched a three-order oblique fractal-shaped cross dipole slot set in a square patch and the bottom one is a solid metal. The parametric study is performed for providing practical design guidelines. A prototype with a thickness of 0.0106λ (λ is the wavelength at 3.18 GHz) of the FPMA was designed, fabricated, measured, and is loaded on a 1×10 guidewave slot array antennas to reduce the in-band radar cross section (RCS) based on their surface current distribution. Experiments are carried out to verify the simulation results, and the experimental results show that the absorption at normal incidence is above 90% from 3.17 to 3.22GHz, the size for the absorber is 0.1λ×0.1λ, the three-order FPMA is miniaturized 60% compared with the zero-order ones, and the array antennas significantly obtain the RCS reduction without the radiation deterioration

Physical properties of CO-dark molecular gas traced by C+^+

Neither HI nor CO emission can reveal a significant quantity of so-called dark gas in the interstellar medium (ISM). It is considered that CO-dark molecular gas (DMG), the molecular gas with no or weak CO emission, dominates dark gas. We identified 36 DMG clouds with C$^+$ emission (data from Galactic Observations of Terahertz C+ (GOT C+) project) and HINSA features. Based on uncertainty analysis, optical depth of HI $\tau\rm_{HI}$ of 1 is a reasonable value for most clouds. With the assumption of $\tau\rm_{HI}=1$, these clouds were characterized by excitation temperatures in a range of 20 K to 92 K with a median value of 55 K and volume densities in the range of $6.2\times10^1$ cm$^{-3}$ to $1.2\times 10^3$ cm$^{-3}$ with a median value of $2.3\times 10^2$ cm$^{-3}$. The fraction of DMG column density in the cloud ($f\rm_{DMG}$) decreases with increasing excitation temperature following an empirical relation $f\rm_{DMG}=-2.1\times 10^{-3}T_(ex,\tau_{HI}=1)$+1.0. The relation between $f\rm_{DMG}$ and total hydrogen column density $N_H$ is given by $f\rm_{DMG}$=$1.0-3.7\times 10^{20}/N_H$. The values of $f\rm_{DMG}$ in the clouds of low extinction group ($A\rm_V \le 2.7$ mag) are consistent with the results of the time-dependent, chemical evolutionary model at the age of ~ 10 Myr. Our empirical relation cannot be explained by the chemical evolutionary model for clouds in the high extinction group ($A\rm_V > 2.7$ mag). Compared to clouds in the low extinction group ($A\rm_V \le 2.7$ mag), clouds in the high extinction group ($A\rm_V > 2.7$ mag) have comparable volume densities but excitation temperatures that are 1.5 times lower. Moreover, CO abundances in clouds of the high extinction group ($A\rm_V > 2.7$ mag) are $6.6\times 10^2$ times smaller than the canonical value in the Milky Way. #[Full version of abstract is shown in the text.]#Comment: Accepted for publishing in Astronomy & Astrophysics. 13 pages, 8 figure