Scattering characteristics of electrically large arbitrarily shaped targets illuminated by an off-axis vortex electromagnetic beam

Abstract

For the application of vortex electromagnetic (EM) beams in practical detection scenes, the scattering characteristics of electrically large arbitrarily shaped targets illuminated by an off-axis Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) vortex beam are investigated and compared to the on-axis incidence case. The vector potential method is used to extract the electric and magnetic field components of the LG beam in different polarization states. The physical optics algorithm is adopted to calculate the scattering fields of four typical targets with the shape of a sphere, NASA almond, blunt cone, and blade model. The results revealed that as the beam center offset and the topological charge of the incident vortex beam increase, the scattering field distorts, and the obvious orbital angular momentum (OAM) spectrum mixing occurs. In addition, OAM spectrum aliasing occurs for asymmetric targets, even at on-axis incidence. These results elucidate the mechanism of vortex EM scattering and provide a reference for applying vortex beams for target detection and recognition.