Liquid Metal (LM) Enabled Microwave and mm-Wave Devices

Liquid metal is a weird and wonderful material. It has some bad reputation for reminding people of toxic mercury or one of the Hollywood villains — T1000 in Terminator. But in the last decade or so, new non-toxic liquid metal alloys have found applications from heat transfer, motor, flexible electronics, to soft robotics, for their interesting fluidic, thermal, and shape-shifting properties. What is also interesting is that liquid metal can be squeezed, pumped, electrically or magnetically triggered or even 3D printed! A lot of work has been done on tunable microwave devices using liquid metals, especially on antennas in the past. This talk will present some latest development of liquid-metal-enabled reconfigurable microwave and mm-wave devices, using a few example devices, from switches, high-performance tunable phase shifters, switchplexers to quad-polarization-reconfigurable antennas. The talk will discuss the opportunities and challenges facing this research area.