This work presents a rigorous circuit model to compute the transmission/reflection properties of a finite number of stacked slit gratings printed on dielectric slabs of arbitrary thickness. A key aspect of the present approach is that the circuit model itself leads us to find fully analytical expressions for the finite stacked-grating structure. An analytical model to obtain the Brillouin diagram for the fully periodic structure (infinite number of identical unit cells) is also provided. Index Terms-Bloch waves, equivalent circuit modeling, metal gratings, periodic structures.
I. I NTRODUCTIONPeriodic structures consisting of planar periodic distribu tions of metallic scatterers printed on one or more dielectric substrates have been studied for decades in the microwaves and optics literature [1], [2]. The simplest case corresponds to an infinite 1D periodic array of slits made in a thin metal plate printed on a dielectric slab [3]- [5]. Nowadays, the analysis of this kind of structures is mostly carried out using commercial software, although recently a lot of attention is being paid in the literature to the development of circuit-like models [6], [7]. These models provide closed-form analytical expressions for the transmission, reflection and absorption properties of that kind of geometries; see, for instance, the quasi-heuristic approaches for 2D arrays of slots in [8], for 2D arrays of patches in [9] or for strip/slit-like structures in [10], as well as the rigorous circuit-model derivation in [11] for 1D arrays of strips/slits. It should be noted that all the above mentioned papers only consider the case of a single structured periodic metallic surface (the periodicity is assumed to be in the transverse directions). The extension of the circuit-like models to the case of cascaded (stacked) structured surfaces is of great interest [see Fig. l(a)]. Thus, for instance, controlled transmission and rejection bands appear associated with the quasi-periodic nature of the system along the propagation direction of the wave when C l = C2 = ... = CN and d1 = d2 = ... = d N. This extension is relatively simple when the distance between the structured metal surfaces is large enough to preclude high-order mode interaction (i.e., when the interaction between metallic surfaces is due to the fundamental TEM propagating mode) [12]. However, interaction through the first few high-order modes drastically modifies the physics of the problem and makes the analysis much more compli cated. The purpose of the present contribution is to present a simple and efficient procedure to extend the analysis reported in [11] in order to account for the electromagnetic properties of a densely packaged set of slit-like structures consisting of a finite (or infinite) number of screens [ Fig. 1 (a)]. To the authors' knowledge, a closed-form solution to this problem is here reported for the first time.