Generation and Beam Steering of Arbitrary-Order OAM With Time-Modulated Circular Arrays
Rui Chen, Minqiang Zou, Xiaodong Wang, A. Tennant
Abstract
In contrast to the popular multimode orbital angular momentum (OAM) generation method that uses uniform circular array combined with phase shifter network, time-modulated circular array (TMCA) does not require multiple radio frequency chains and costly analog devices and it requires only switches. In this article, an arbitrary-order OAM generation and beam steering method for TMCA is proposed, which incorporates the existing integer-order OAM generation and beam steering method as a special case. Furthermore, we analyze the effect of elements <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">on</small> – <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">off</small> ordering on the generation of OAM beams, and prove that sequential ordering has the lowest power consumption. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed methods is validated through electromagnetic simulations.