Extraordinary Directive Emission and Scanning from an Array of Radiation Sources with Hyperuniform Disorder

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.