Degrees of Freedom and Modes in Optics and Electromagnetics

Optics and radio-frequency electromagnetics now both need to work with many distinct channels for communications and sensing. A common framework, based on singular-value decomposition, clarifies the number of degrees of freedom and the true nature of orthogonal communications modes, and resolves many paradoxes. This approach leads to fundamental results in optics and electromagnetics, and maps well to recent advances in complex optical interferometric circuits for handling multi-mode fields. This invited talk, given at the IEEE Conference on Antenna Measurements & Applications, introduces these ideas, and especially the increasing commonality of this approach across both radio-frequency electromagnetism and optics.

Invited talk, 2021 IEEE Conference on Antenna Measurements & Applications, Antibes, Juan-Les-Pins (virtual meeting), Paper WeBT2.2