Beam Divergence Reduction of Vortex Waves With a Tailored Lens and a Tailored Reflector

Reducing the strong beam divergence inherent to Orbital Angular Momentum waves (also known as OAM waves or vortex waves), a tailored lens and a tailored reflector are presented in this study. The generation of the OAM waves is accomplished by a Uniform Circular Patch Antenna Array (UCA) operating at 10 GHz. Here, the tailored lens and reflector are set up by two correspondingly designed shape functions rotated around the antenna's center axis in broadside direction (i.e. body of revolution approach). Initially, the tailored lens is introduced to be compared to the UCA in the presence and absence of the conventional lens separately. Upon the usage of the tailored lens, a gain improvement of 5.8 dB has been obtained in the simulation compared to a gain of 4.8 dB in the measurement. On the other hand, the tailored reflector is set under the same procedure to be compared also to the UCA with and without a conventional reflector. Both of the reflectors are simulated under idealized conditions with the aid of an OAM impressed field source used as an emitter for a meaningful comparison. The simulated gain has shown a better performance accomplished by the tailored reflector as the height r
₀
reaches a level less than 1.5λ as well as the opening angle θ is less than 38° (given an UCA with an element separation distance d=λ/2 ). Furthermore, three different ground plane shapes with realistic UCA are applied for the simulation procedure where each of them is perturbing the radiation of the reflector. All of the lenses and the reflectors are manufactured and later measured in an anechoic chamber to undergo a comparison with the simulated results. This article demonstrates that the vortex waves need a tailored lens or a tailored reflector to decrease the beam divergence effectively especially when the radius of the UCA becomes increasingly large.