An inspired metamaterial-based highly efficient monopole antenna displaying wide-/dual-band resonances along with self-filtering properties is presented. The monopole has high out-of-band suppression characteristics that lead to very close to 0 dB band-stop between the antenna dual resonant bands. The antenna operates at the two WLAN services of 2.65–3.25 and 5–7 GHz with stopband with total reflection at 4.5 GHz. The designed filtering characteristics are based on current coupling for the dual-band functions and current neutralization for the stopband function. Moreover, the proposed antenna has a very high radiation efficiency of 97 and 99% at 3 and 6 GHz, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed antenna exhibits an omni-directional radiation pattern with coplanar waveguide feed for simple integration with passive/active devices. Moreover, the antenna properties are achieved with a compact antenna size (30 × 30 mm2). With all presented results, the proposed antenna is very competitive over recent relevant antennas. In addition, a very good agreement between theoretical, full-wave simulations and measurements is achieved.

Beams for heavy ion fusion are likely to require at least partial neutralization in the reactor chamber. Present target designs call for higher beam currents and smaller focal spots than most earlier designs, leading to high space-charge fields. Focusing is complicated by beam stripping in the low-pressure background gas expected in chambers. One method proposed for neutralization is passing an ion beam through a plasma before the beam enters the chamber. In this article, the electromagnetic particle-in-cell code LSP is used to study the effectiveness of this form of preneutralization for a range of plasma and beam parameters. For target chamber pressures below a few milliTorr of flibe gas, preneutralization is found to significantly reduce the beam emittance growth and spot size in the chamber.