An official website of the United States government
An oscillator made of a periodic waveguide comprising of uniform lossless segments with discrete nonlinear gain and radiating resistive elements prefers to operate at exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD). The steady-state regime is an EPD with π phase shift between unit cells, for various choices of small signal gain of the nonlinear elements and number of unit cells. We demonstrated this fact by monitoring both current and voltage across each nonlinear gain element and finding its effective admittance at the oscillating frequency and checking the degeneracy of the eigenmodes at such point. The EPD studied here is very promising for many applications that incorporate discrete distributed coherent sources and radiation-loss elements. Operating in the vicinity of such special degeneracy conditions may lead to potential performance enhancement in the various microwave, THz and optical systems with distributed gain and radiation, paving the way for a new class of active integrated antenna arrays and radiating laser arrays.
more »
« less
Novel Regime for Antenna Array Oscillators Based on Exceptional Point of Degeneracy
We demonstrate a new regime of operation to conceive radiating array oscillators. This regime is based on the dispersion engineering of coupled transmission lines (CTLs) utilizing an exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD), which represents the coalescence of multiple eigenmodes. We propose the "gain and loss balance" regime for structures exhibiting significant radiation losses to enable an innovative regime for a class of coherent EPD-based radiating oscillators with stable oscillation frequency. Moreover, this class of radiating oscillators shows an interesting trend of how the oscillation threshold scales with the length of the structure. This EPD concept has potential applications in high power-efficiency oscillators and high-power radiation.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1711975
- PAR ID:
- 10156733
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 13th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), Krakow, Poland, Poland, 31 March-5 April 2019.
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
A microstrip-technology three-way waveguide has been conceived to display exceptional modal degeneracy in the presence of periodic gain and radiation losses satisfying parity-time ( PT ) glide-symmetry. A third order exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD) is obtained in the modal dispersion relation, where three Floquet-Bloch eigenmodes coalesce at a single frequency, in their eigenvalues and polarization states. In the proposed structure, PT -glide-symmetry is achieved using periodically spaced lumped (radiation) loss and gain elements, each shifted by half a period. This particular degeneracy can be utilized in the design of devices such as radiating arrays with distributed amplifiers, arrays of oscillators, and sensors.more » « less
-
We investigate wave properties in coupled transmission lines (CTLs) under a special condition known as the exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD) at which two or more of the supported eigenmodes of the system coalesce. At an EPD, not only the eigenvalues (resonances or wavenumbers) of the system (a resonator or a waveguide) coalesce but also the eigenvectors (polarization states) coalesce, and the number of coalescing eigenmodes defines the order of the degeneracy. We investigate different structures, either periodic or uniform CTLs, that are capable of exhibiting EPDs in their dispersion diagram. Secondly, we show an experimental verification of the existence of EPDs through measuring the dispersion of microstrip-based CTLs in the microwave spectrum. For antenna array configurations, we discuss the effect of CTLs radiative and dissipative losses on EPDs and how introducing gain to the CTLs compensate for such losses restoring the EPD in a fully radiating array, in what we define as the gain and distributed-radiation balance regime. Therefore, we show how to obtain large linear and planar arrays that efficiently generate microwave oscillations, and by spatial combination they are able to generate collimated beams with large radiation intensity. Finally, we show other promising applications based on the concept of EPDs in ultra-sensitive sensors or reconfigurable antennas.more » « less
-
We exploit a second order exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD) to enhance frequency purity and oscillation stability in oscillators. The EPD we consider in this paper is a regular band edge (RBE) that exists in lossless and gainless periodic waveguides. We present an example of single-ladder oscillator that may act as a leaky wave antenna (LWA). The oscillator we develop has 8 unit-cells that form a resonant cavity and an active element is used to compensate for the losses and start the oscillation. We show that the oscillation frequency is in proximity of the RBE frequency thanks to the second order degeneracy.more » « less
-
We review and explore sensor applications based on electromagnetic systems operating near an exceptional point of degeneracy (EPD). The EPD is defined as the point at which the system eigenmodes coalesce in both their eigenvalues and eigenvectors varying a system parameter. Sensors based on EPDs show sensitivity proportional to δ 1/m , where δ is a perturbation of a system parameter and m is the order of the EPD. EPDs manifest in PT-symmetric systems or periodic systems that can be periodic in either time or space. We review all the methods to obtain EPD based sensors, and we focus on two classes of ultra-sensitive EPD systems: i) periodic linear time-varying single oscillators, and ii) optical gyroscopes based on a modified coupled resonators optical waveguide (CROW) exhibiting 4th order EPD.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
