Abstract
The effect of rotational disorder on the microwave transmission through thin metallic checkerboard arrays has been experimentally studied. Broad resonant features below the onset of diffraction, attributed to electromagnetic radiation coupling through the structure via the evanescent fields of bound surface waves, are found to be strongly dependent on the electrical connectivity of the surface. By applying rotational disorder to the elements comprising the arrays, with the lattice constant and element size unchanged, the electrical connectivity of the structure can be controlled whilst maintaining periodicity. The results show that rotational disorder can significantly affect transmission only when it changes the structure's connectivity. When the initial structure is just above the connectivity threshold (where the metallic occupancy is 50%), increasing disorder causes the resonant features in transmission to invert as the structure switches from a predominantly connected array to a disconnected array. When approximately half of the connections are broken, the resonant features are suppressed, with scattering loss shown to dramatically increase to as much as 40% of the incident power over a broad frequency range. The result is a thin, highly effective scatterer of microwaves.