Microwave Radar with Orbital Angular Momentum Control

Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) microwave sensing is a novel technique that exploits the quantum nature of microwave radiation in the form of OAM, or at the macroscopic scale, electromagnetic (EM) beam vorticity. This research is of keen interest as it may improve the performance of microwave sensing and communication through the control and sensing of photon and EM beam degrees of freedom that most conventional systems do not use. A macroscopic interpretation of OAM is propagating waves with vortex-shaped wave fronts. At the photon level, OAM appears as an additional quantum degree of freedom with integer quanta of angular momentum added to each photon. The use of OAM in microwave radar has at least two potential advantages. The vortex shape may enable better discernment of cylindrical versus non-cylindrical buried objects. At the quantum level, entanglement of OAM with other quantum degrees of freedom may enable enhanced imaging, such as the ghost imaging of objects that produce weak signal returns. In this research, OAM control is achieved via a synthetic phased array technique. The development of a magnetron-based OAM source is also described