Active control of electromagnetic fields in layered media

Abstract

This article presents a numerical strategy for actively manipulating electromagnetic (EM) fields in layered media. In particular, we develop a scheme to characterize an EM source that will generate some predetermined field patterns in prescribed disjoint exterior regions in layered media. The proposed question of specifying such an EM source is not an inverse source problem (ISP) since the existence of a solution is not guaranteed. Moreover, our problem allows for the possibility of prescribing different EM fields in mutually disjoint exterior regions. This question involves a linear inverse problem that requires solving a severely ill-posed optimization problem (i.e. suffering from possible non-existence or non-uniqueness of a solution). The forward operator is defined by expressing the EM fields as a function of the current at the source using the layered media Green's function (LMGF), accounting for the physical parameters of the layered media. This results to integral equations that are then discretized using the method of moments (MoM), yielding an ill-posed system of linear equations. Unlike in ISPs, stability with respect to data is not an issue here since no data is measured. Rather, stability with respect to input current approximation is important. To get such stable solutions, we applied two regularization methods, namely, the truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD) method and the Tikhonov regularization method with the Morozov Discrepancy Principle. We performed several numerical simulations to support the theoretical framework and analyzes, and to demonstrate the accuracy and feasibility of the proposed numerical algorithms.

Keywords:

• Antenna radiation pattern synthesis
• electromagnetic propagation in nonhomogeneous media
• integral equations
• Green function
• inverse problems
• optimization methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

J. Chen and C. Qi would like to acknowledge the National Science Foundation, USA for funding their work under the award 1801925. D. Onofrei and N. J. A. Egarguin would like to acknowledge the Army Research Office, USA, for funding their work under the award W911NF-17-1-0478.