Orbital Angular Momentum and Virtual Experiments for Microwave Imaging

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) is gaining great attention in physics and electromagnetic community owing to an intriguing debate concerning its suitability for widening the channel capacity in next generation wireless communications. While such a debate is still a matter of controversy, in this paper we exploit OAM for microwave imaging within the framework known as Virtual Experiments (VE). VE tackles the inverse scattering problem introducing an effective rearrangement of the original scattering experiments into new 'virtual' ones, by means of a proper 'design equation', in order to condition time-harmonic fields to assume a specific spatial distribution in the imaging domain. In particular, in this paper we exploit OAM fields to perform linear quantitative imaging via linear of strong targets, i.e. targets electrically large and with high contrast, which in general require the use of non linear approaches to be carefully imaged.