Experimental Study of RCS Diversity with Novel No-divergent OAM Beams

TL;DR

This study introduces a new type of OAM beam with uniform illumination for enhanced RCS diversity, improving detection of weak and small targets in future transportation systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel OAM beam design that overcomes divergence issues, demonstrating improved RCS diversity for target detection.

Findings

Novel OAM beams provide significant azimuthal RCS diversity.

The new beams eliminate the energy divergence problem of traditional OAM.

Experimental results show enhanced detection capabilities for small targets.

Abstract

This research proposes a novel approach utilizing Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) beams to enhance Radar Cross Section (RCS) diversity for target detection in future transportation systems. Unlike conventional OAM beams with hollow-shaped divergence patterns, the new proposed OAM beams provide uniform illumination across the target without a central energy void, but keep the inherent phase gradient of vortex property. We utilize waveguide slot antennas to generate four different modes of these novel OAM beams at X-band frequency. Furthermore, these different mode OAM beams are used to illuminate metal models, and the resulting RCS is compared with that obtained using plane waves. The findings reveal that the novel OAM beams produce significant azimuthal RCS diversity, providing a new approach for the detection of weak and small targets.This study not only reveals the RCS diversity phenomenon based on novel OAM beams of different modes but also addresses the issue of energy divergence that hinders traditional OAM beams in long-range detection applications.