A Negative Group Delay (NGD) filter prototype design based on cascaded identical 2nd-order baseband stages is presented. The prototype design achieves an NGD-bandwidth product that in the upper asymptotic limit for a distributed design is a function of out-of-band gain in decibels raised to the power 3/4. This is an improvement of previous cascaded first-order designs that have an NGD-bandwidth functional dependency of out-of-band gain in decibels to the power of 1/2. The bandwidth is taken as the 3 dB amplitude response bandwidth. The corresponding NGD design upshifted to a non-zero center frequency, i.e. a Band-Stop Filter (BSF) design, is shown to be possible to implement with Sallen-Key topology, and an example is presented for a 500 MHz center frequency and a 100 MHz (20%) 3 dB bandwidth. The filter shows a 4.05 ns negative group delay with a 1.28 ns in-band variation and a 3-dB amplitude response over the bandwidth of 100 MHz, achieving an NGD-bandwidth product of 0.405. An in-band distortion metric is presented, which can be evaluated for any specified time-domain input waveform. It is shown that the bandwidth, order of filter and desired distortion for a particular input waveform are interrelated. Therefore, the proposed in-band distortion metric constitutes another trade-off quantity to be checked for any type of NGD design.....

A co-planar waveguide-fed symmetrical staircase-shaped ultra-wideband antenna is proposed in this work. This antenna consists of three pairs of rectangular notches, two symmetrical C-shaped slots and two pairs of quarter-circular-ring-slits which are etched on the rectangular radiator and ground plane, respectively. By sequentially inserting three pairs of rectangular notches with proper positions, an excellent impedance bandwidth of 1.55-16.95 GHz (166.51%), i.e., a 10.94:1 ratio bandwidth is obtained. The total volume of the prototype is merely 0.239×0.224×0.004λ_l³, λ_l wavelength of the free space at the lowest operating frequency (i.e., 1.55 GHz). As a result, wider impedance bandwidth, fair gain and better impedance matching of the proposed antenna are obtained. It is observed that the simulation results are in good agreement with the measurement results. The transmission line model (TLM) of the proposed antenna is presented, and it shows the antenna behavior based on the effect of each element. It is observed that the characteristics of the TLM model are close to the simulation result using the CST simulator. The prototype is successfully implemented, fabricated, and compared with the experimental results.....

Assis predicted that based on Weber's electrodynamics, an alternative direct-action model formulated before Maxwell, a charge accelerating inside a sphere at constant electric potential, should have a measureable effective mass. Although initially some experiments appeared in the literature that indeed claimed such an effect, all recent studies found no evidence. All experiments so far used either discharges or electrons with non-constant accelerations that could mask the existence of Assis's prediction. We performed an experiment using a Perrin tube, which produces a beam of electrons with a constant velocity that can be deflected by Helmholtz coils to hit a Faraday cup. The tube assembly was put inside a spherical shell, which could be charged up to 20 kV. Any effective mass of the electrons would have changed their position on the Faraday cup. We found no variation of the electron position within our experimental accuracy, which rules out Assis's effect by two orders of magnitude. This confirms Maxwell's theory and the fact that electrostatic potential energy cannot be localized to individual charges.....

As the explicit finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is restricted by the well-known Courant-Friedruchs-Lewy (CFL) stability condition and is inefficient for solving numerical tasks with fine structures, various implicit methods have been proposed to tackle the problem, while many of them adopt time-splitting schemes that generally need at least two sub-steps to finish update at a full time step, and the strategies used seem to be an unnatural habit of computation compared with the most widely-used one-step methods. The procedure of splitting time step also reduces computational efficiency and makes implementation of these algorithms complex. In the present paper, two novel one-step absolutely stable FDTD methods including one-step alternating-direction-implicit (ADI) and one-step locally-one-dimensional (LOD) methods are proposed. The two proposed methods are derived from the original ADI-FDTD method and LOD-FDTD method through some linear operations applied to the original methods and are algebraically equivalent to the original methods respectively, but they both avoid the appearance of intermediate fields and are one-step method just like the conventional FDTD method. Numerical experiments are carried out for validation of the two proposed methods, and from the numerical results it can be concluded that the proposed methods can solve equation correctly and are simpler than the original methods, and their computation efficiency is close to that of the existing one-step leapfrog ADI-FDTD method.....