# Programmable low-coherence wavefronts for enhanced localization

## TL;DR

A new method for generating controllable wavefronts improves localization accuracy by ten times compared to existing techniques.

## Contribution

A novel approach for generating broadband reconfigurable wavefronts with low spatial and spectral coherence is introduced.

## Key findings

- The proposed wavefronts enable localization with an order-of-magnitude improvement in accuracy.
- Frequency-domain decorrelation is a key feature for achieving high-accuracy localization.

## Abstract

Engineering the properties of electromagnetic wavefronts has become essential to imaging, wireless security, sensing, and wireless communication. In particular, wavefronts that exhibit low spatial coherence can enable sensing functionalities with high accuracy and low latency. The typical use of such wavefronts cannot take advantage of these possibilities, as they require the ability to dynamically reconfigure the wavefront in a controllable and repeatable fashion, over a broad spectral bandwidth. Here, we propose a new approach for generating broadband reconfigurable wavefronts which not only exhibit low spatial coherence at a particular frequency, but are also decorrelated with the wavefronts simultaneously generated at other frequencies. We demonstrate that this frequency-domain decorrelation is a key feature that, in combination with dynamic reconfigurability, enables localization measurements with an order-of-magnitude improvement in accuracy compared to the state of the art.

Burak Bilgin and colleagues propose an approach for generating broadband reconfigurable wavefronts exhibiting low spatial and spectral coherence. Broadcasting such wavefronts enables rapid localization with an order-of-magnitude improvement in accuracy compared to prior methods.