Quasi-Orbital Angular Momentum (Q-OAM) Generated by Quasi-Circular Array Antenna (QCA)

Abstract

Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM), as a property of Electromagnetic (EM) fields has recently been proposed for Radio and Microwave communications. This paper investigates a new class of OAM radiation patterns for Radio and Microwave applications, namely, Quasi-OAM radiation patterns, induced by a proposed Quasi-Circular Array Antenna (QCA). Simulations and Experiments show that Quasi-OAM waves can be induced and preserved in the far-field using the proposed QCA apertures and configurations, demonstrating non-integer dominant OAM modes corresponding to l = +1 and l = -1 with a directional quasi intensity and rotational 2π phase profiles. The proposed method in this work significantly reduces aperture size and cost by using Quasi-Circular Arrays of N Q = 5 and N Q = 6 elements in lieu of conventional OAM circular aperture arrays with N = 8 elements.