IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation Announces a Special Issue on Theory and Applications of Characteristic Modes

The Theory of Characteristic Modes (TCM) had its humble beginnings in the early 1970's. The beauty of TCM lies in its ability to fully characterize the radiation and scattering properties of an arbitrary object based only on the object's geometry and material properties. This ability provides valuable insights into an antenna's behavior independent of the feeding arrangement as well as providing information about how desirable radiation modes can be excited. This feature has led to its use to design integrated antennas in the High Frequency (HF) band for land vehicles, ships and aircraft. However, TCM had largely remained a specialist field until it was rediscovered for aiding the design of mobile handset antennas about a decade ago. In particular, TCM provides a powerful tool to understand and exploit excitation of the terminal chassis to enhance antenna performance. Another powerful feature of TCM is that multiple characteristic modes at a given frequency facilitate orthogonal radiation patterns, which provide effective Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antennas.