Abstract
The main challenge in the antenna or laser array design is to find the element distribution that best meets the optimal performance for broadband emission and large angle beam steering. In the past, the design strategy was restricted to arrays with periodic, aperiodic, and random distributions, which are characterized by several fundamental limitations related to the operating frequency, the power consumption that arises from interelement interference, and the computation time required during the random optimization process. Furthermore, the interelement spacing has a lower or upper bound due to the elements' physical dimensions and the former prohibits the use of the aforementioned element distributions for small operating wavelengths, whereas the latter induces high-order grating lobes. We prove that hyperuniform disorder is an array element distribution evolving through natural selection processes that warrants a disordered solution to the array design when this is treated as a packing problem. We theoretically and experimentally report that the array with hyperuniform disorder exhibits extraordinary directive emission and scanning features, while being scalable for extra-large arrays without any additional computational effort.
Highlights
Directive emission with beam scanning has been the main motivation of phased array design, the concept of which has been extended from microwave to optics [1,2] for the coherent control of optical emission by shaping the phase of laser pulses
The resulting array configuration is made of 144 Vivaldi elements, which, as we have shown in the previous section, will be hyperuniform disordered as well
We have proposed and demonstrated how the concept of disordered hyperuniformity warrants an answer to the antenna array design, which we view as a packing problem
Summary
Directive emission with beam scanning has been the main motivation of phased array design, the concept of which has been extended from microwave to optics [1,2] for the coherent control of optical emission by shaping the phase of laser pulses. The mathematical principle of the phased array is based on wave diffraction physics, in which the radiation field results from the coherent addition of all radiation sources in the array, calculated by adding the desired phase shift to the fringing term. They do not explicitly require specific element distribution specifications, traditional phased arrays have been largely based on periodically ordered distributions due to their mathematical simplicity. Several examples include the convex optimization technique [8,9,10], the matrix pencil method [11,12], and the compressive sensing technique [13,14]
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