Guiding and radiating microwave components with enhanced functionalities enabled by metamaterials

In this contribution, we describe the enhanced functionalities of a new class of guiding and radiating components based on the use of metamaterial-inspired structures. In particular, we have recently shown that integrating some electrically small particles inside standard waveguides components and horn antennas allow providing some additional functionalities to the overall system such as filtering operations with a pass-band or a notched-band behavior, combination and splitting capabilities of signals with different carrier or polarization state, and polarization conversion properties. Here, we briefly review our previous works on this topic and we show our latest results including the realization of arbitrarily curved channels connecting microwave waveguides and of a chiral particle able to rotate the polarization state of antennas and waveguide components.