Advances of Research on Antenna Technology of Vortex Electromagnetic Waves

Abstract

The vortex electromagnetic wave, which carries the Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM), reflects a new degree of freedom in addition to the traditional degrees of freedom such as intensity, phase, frequency, and polarization. Theoretically, vortex electromagnetic wave, at any frequency, has an infinite number of orthogonal modes that do not interfere with each other, and in recent years, they have shown important potential applications in the fields of radar imaging, wireless communication and so on. Therefore, they have attracted considerable attention from scholars worldwide owing to their high research value and application prospects. Here, this paper mainly introduces the recent research advances on the antenna technology of vortex electromagnetic wave, including single microstrip patch antenna, array antenna, traveling wave antenna, and metasurface antenna structure. The single microstrip patch antenna is widely used owing to its simple structure and low manufacturing cost. The traveling wave antenna can generate multi-OAM mode vortex electromagnetic waves in a wide-frequency range. The array antenna is easy to design and controllably generate high-gain OAM electromagnetic waves with different modes. The metasurface antennas do not require complex feeding networks, which has the advantage of a lower profile of the antenna. Finally, we summarize these four common vortex antennas and further look forward to their future developments.