Visualization of High Frequency Diffraction Based on Physical Optics

Tetsu SHIJO  Takayoshi ITOH  Makoto ANDO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E87-C   No.9   pp.1607-1614
Publication Date: 2004/09/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Wave Technologies for Wireless and Optical Communications)
Category: Basic Electromagnetic Analysis
Keyword: 
high frequency diffraction,  physical optics,  stational phase method,  visualization,  fictitious penetrating rays,  

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Summary: 
High frequency (HF) diffraction is known as local phenomena, and only parts of the scatterer contribute to the field such as the edge, corner and specular reflection point etc. Many HF diffraction techniques such as Geometrical Theory of Diffraction (GTD), Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD) and Physical Theory of Diffraction (PTD) utilize these assumptions explicitly. Physical Optics (PO), on the other hand, expresses the diffraction in terms of radiation integral or the sum total of contributions from all the illuminated parts of scatterers, while the PO currents are locally defined at the point of integration. This paper presents PO-based visualization of the scattering and diffraction phenomena and tries to provide the intuitive understanding of local property of HF diffraction as well as the relations between PO and the ray techniques such as GTD, UTD etc. A weighting named "eye function" is introduced in PO radiation integrals to take into account of local cancellation between rapidly oscillating contributions from adjacent currents; this extracts important areas of current distribution, whose location moves not only with the source but also with the observation point. PO visualization illustrates both local property of HF scattering and defects associated with ray techniques. Furthermore, careful examination of visualized image reminds us of the error factor in PO as applied for curved surfaces, named fictitious penetrating rays. They have been scarcely recognized if not for visualization, though they disturb the geometrical shadow behind the opaque scatterer and can be the leading error factors of PO in shadow regions. Finally, visualization is extended to slot antennas with finite ground planes by hybrid use of modified edge representation (MER) to assess the significance of edge diffraction.