450 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO.
2, FEBRUARY 2008
Scattering of Spherically and Hemispherically
Stratified Lenses Fed by Any Real Source
Benjamin Fuchs, Member, IEEE, Sébastien Palud, Student Member, IEEE, Laurent Le Coq, Olivier Lafond,
Mohamed Himdi, and Sébastien Rondineau, Member, IEEE
Abstract—An analytical method to compute the scattering
of spherically and hemispherically stratified lens antennas is
described. The expansion of any real source on spherical wave
functions is detailed and validated by comparison to commercial
software simulations and measurements at both 50 GHz and 77
GHz. A mode matching technique (MMT) based on spherical
wave functions is first used to analyze the scattering by spherically
stratified lens antennas. The far field patterns and directivity
obtained are in excellent agreement with commercial software
simulations and measurements for a six-shell Luneburg lens at 6
GHz. This MMT is then extended to hemispherically stratified lens
antenna analysis. Its validation is also carried out by comparisons
to both commercial software and measurements for a three-shell
half Maxwell fish-eye lens fed by an open-ended waveguide at
W-band. The expansion on spherical modes gives direct access to
the field everywhere. To highlight the progressive focusing effect
of inhomogeneous lens antennas, the electric field is mapped in
terms of magnitude and phase in the neighborhood of the entire
structure. One of the originalities of this work is the quantification
of the reaction created by the scatterer on the feed. Narrowing the
scatterer to a stratified lens does not affect the generality of the
presented procedure. While providing controlled accuracy, the
MMT tremendously reduces both computation time and memory
load in comparison to commercial software.
Index Terms—Lens antennas, Mode matching technique
(MMT), scattering, spherical wave functions.
I. INTRODUCTION
INCE THE development of millimeter-wave applications,
S a growing interest is observed in inhomogeneous lenses.
Due to the increase of the operating frequency, these lenses now
exhibit an inconsequential weight. Moreover, their focusing
properties, broadband behavior and ability to form multiple
beams make them especially suitable for many millimeter-wave
communication and radar systems. For instance, the spherical
Luneburg and hemispherical half Maxwell fish-eye lenses can
be used for automotive radars [1], [2] and astronomy applica-
tions [3].
Manuscript received April 13, 2007; revised October 22, 2007. This work was
supported by the IETR and Rennes Métropole.
B. Fuchs, S. Palud, L. Le Coq, O. Lafond and M. Himdi are with the Institute
of Electronics and Telecommunications of Rennes, UMR CNRS 6164, Univer-
sity of Rennes I, Rennes Cedex 35042, France (e-mail: benj.fuchs@gmail.com;
sebastien.palud@univ-rennes1.fr; laurent.le-coq@univ-rennes1.fr; olivier.la-
fond@univ-rennes1.fr; mohamed.himdi@univ-rennes1.fr).
S. Rondineau is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
at the University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0425 USA (e-mail: sebastien.
rondineau@gmail.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2007.915458
0018-926X/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
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The refraction index of these lenses follows a radial distri-
bution given by [4]
(1)
for Luneburg and half Maxwell fish-eye lenses, respectively,
where is the normalized radial position. Since no reliable
technique is currently able to yield the continuous gradient
index, numerous methods have been proposed to approximate
it [5]–[7]. The easiest technique to implement consists of as-
sembling a finite number of concentric homogeneous dielectric
shells [8]–[10]. These lenses are called stratified or multishell
lenses. The inhomogeneous lenses have first been designed
and analyzed using ray tracing techniques as is usually done in
optics [4], [11]–[13]. However, its direct application assumes
that all dimensions are large compared to a wavelength. To
overcome this limitation, geometrical optics has recently been
combined with the diffraction method [14] and coupled with
physical optics to analyze double shell shaped lenses [15], [16]
however all internal reflections cannot be taken into account.
Other numerical methods have been employed to analyze
layered structures such as finite difference time domain [17],
the finite element method in [18] or the electric field integral
equation and the moment method in [19], [20]. However, they
only deal with structures having limited electric dimensions,
usually not more than twenty free space wavelengths, and are
time and memory consuming.
In contrast, for spherical structures, the solution of the
homogeneous Helmholtz equation is analytical. This classical
eigenfunction solution, known as Mie series, has beenextensively
used and reported for plane wave scattering by a conducting
and, later, dielectric sphere [21], [22]. Then, the scattering
of a diverging incident field by a layered dielectric lens has
been solved using different formulations: Mie series [23], [24],
scalar potentials [25], dyadic Green functions [26]–[28] or
mode matching technique (MMT) based on spherical wave
functions [29]. More realistic feeds, such as conformed circular
printed patches, have also been accurately studied [30], [31]
when associated with spherical lenses.
This paper deals with a spherical wave function based MMT
to study the interaction between spherical/hemispherical strat-
ified lenses and any real feed. Section II briefly reviews the
spherical wave functions. The expansion on this basis for any
source is derived and the deduction of antenna characteristics
from spherical modal coefficients is detailed. In Section III, the
MMT is applied to deal with the scattering of spherically and
hemispherically stratified lens antennas. The reaction of the feed
FUCHS et al.: SCATTERING OF SPHERICALLY AND HEMISPHERICALLY STRATIFIED LENSES 451

Fig. 2. Chart summarizing the source expansion steps on the spherical modal
basis. This expansion makes possible the analysis of spherical lens antennas
Fig. 1. Three-dimensional representation of a multishell spherical/hemispher- from which is deduced the study of hemispherical ones.
ical lens fed by an open-ended waveguide. The notations used for the q-layered
structure and spherical coordinate system (r; ; ') are indicated. The faces of
the box enclosing the feed are of the closed Huygens surface on which its equiv- The spherical wave vectors are
alent electromagnetic currents are obtained. The space is divided into three ana-
lycity domains delimited by the Wilcox spheres S and S of radius r and
r ensuring the required uniform convergence of the expansions inside S
and outside S . The (xOy) cutting plane shows how the half Maxwell fish-eye
lens is deduced from the whole spherical lens.

to the scatterer is also considered. Section IV applies the devel-

oped theory in order to highlight some numerical results such
as series truncation order, near/far field, coupling effects of the
lens on the feed and computation load. Experimental validations
and comparisons with commercial software of the MMT results
are outlined in Section V. The conclusions are summarized in
Section VI.
(3)
II. FORMULATION AND BASIC EQUATIONS
This Section sets the notations and briefly reviews the
spherical wave functions. It also describes how to obtain the
spherical modal coefficients of any source. It finally details
formulas providing the far field and directivity from the modal is the wave number and is the intrinsic medium impedance.
coefficients. and is its complement in the set. and are the
spherical Bessel function of the first kind and Hankel function of
the second kind respectively. As for the azimuthal dependency,
A. Spherical Wave Functions of the Fields stands for the associated Legendre polynomial of degree
To match the overall geometry of the analyzed structure, we and order .
work in the spherical coordinate system, shown in Fig. 1. The More details about this development with similar notations
time harmonic dependence is omitted for clarity. can be found in Stratton’s book chapter VII [21].
The electromagnetic field, in a charge free medium, is ex-
B. Source Expansion
panded on the zero divergence spherical modal basis
associated with the spherical modal coefficients and To handle the scattering by stratified lenses, it is necessary to
first expand the source radiation in free space on spherical wave
functions as shown in Fig. 2.
To the best knowledge of the authors, all previous work
dealing with lens modeling presented either ideal sources such
as plane waves [21], endfire dipoles [28] and complex Huygens
[24], [32] or approximated extended sources [29], [33].
(2) Instead of dealing with these idealizations or approximations,
we improve the source representation by directly projecting its
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452
equivalent current distribution on the spherical wave basis as
expanded in [30]
From either measured or computed data, equivalent electric and
magnetic currents, and , respectively, are extracted in the
volume containing the original feed, (see the Huygens box
in Fig. 1). These currents are then projected, according to (4),
on the spherical modal basis.
This expansion has to be done very carefully:
• the feed is not charge free and therefore cannot be ex-
panded on the basis constituted of vectors derived
from a curl only;
• the series expansion describing the electromagnetic field
must be analytic.
These two concerns are solved once and for all when using the
so-called Wilcox spheres [34]. The space is divided into three
concentric regions: the outer zone (outside ), the inner zone
(inside ) and the intermediate zone that contains all sources
as shown in Fig. 1. According to Wilcox’s theorem, based on
the convergence analysis of Bessel series, the expansion on the
basis inside and outside converges uniformly
toward the electromagnetic field.
A similar but slightly different expansion is proposed by
Wood in [35]. Indeed, the radial part of the spherical expansion
proposed by Wood is based on spherical Hankel functions of
the first and second kind, and , respectively. This small
difference has significant consequences in terms of convergence
and numerical stability. To illustrate this, consider the heart
shell of a spherical lens. Wilcox’s theorem imposes the field to
be expanded in terms of spherical Bessel functions of the first
kind, , which have a finite value at the origin. In Wood’s
expansion, both and are involved and Wood’s modal ex-
pansion is related to the one presented here via the well known
relation . But, both and diverge at the
origin. This means that Wood’s expansion creates artificially
two sets of modes that diverge at the origin but whose sum con-
verges. Consequently, even though the overall series expansion
representing the total field has a uniform convergence behavior
as predicted by Wilcox, each of Wood’s modes is infinite at the
origin, and so special care has to be taken to control numerical
instabilities created by loss of uniform convergence in some
subsets of the total field expansion. The expansion proposed in
this paper avoids all of these concerns.
C. Antenna Characteristics From Spherical Modal Coefficients
The modal spherical coefficients and in (2) encompass all
the information characterizing the antenna. From these coeffi-
cients, one can determine the far field radiation patterns as well
as the directivity.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2008
The spherical Bessel functions and have the following
asymptotic behavior as given in [36] :
(5)
By substituting (3) and (5) into (2) and omitting the second order
evolution , one gets the following electric far field as
:
(4)
(6)
The directivity is defined via the radiation intensity [37]
(7)
where the radiation intensity of an isotropic source is
(8)
III. SCATTERING BY STRATIFIED LENSES
The spherical wave functions-based MMT is described in this
section to analyze hemispherically stratified lens antennas. As
summed up in Fig. 2, the first part of this method is the anal-
ysis of spherically stratified lenses. Afterwards, the extension to
hemispherically stratified structures requires severals steps that
are detailed in this Section. Furthermore, the coupling effects of
the lens on the feed are considered.
In the following, denotes the shell number and the outer
radius of the th shell with the wave number and intrinsic
medium impedance as depicted in Fig. 1.
A. Spherically Stratified Lenses
The method, used to compute the scattering by spherically
stratified lenses, is similar to the one proposed by Sanford [29]
and was initially introduced by Stratton [21].
First, boundary conditions are applied at each interfaces. This
leads to four linearly independant equations for each boundary.
By applying the the condition of finiteness of the energy at
the origin and knowing the incident field, the overall system
is solved by cascading the boundary condition equations. This
yields directly the spherical modal coefficients ( , ), rep-
resenting the total electromagnetic field, within each shell
.
Note that with this formalism, the field is known everywhere
(both near- and far- field) in a source free region.
FUCHS et al.: SCATTERING OF SPHERICALLY AND HEMISPHERICALLY STRATIFIED LENSES
B. Hemispherically Stratified Lenses
Sequential steps to analyze hemispherical lenses are neces-
sary. As reported in Fig. 2, one first calculates the electromag-
netic field on the (xOy) plane of the lens corresponding to the
cutting plane in Fig. 1. The expression of the electromagnetic
field ( , ) in the th shell is, for ,
with and , and for any
(9)
The discontinuity between the dielectric and the air on the flat
side of the lens is then overcome by applying the continuity of
the tangential electromagnetic field. This leads to the following
equivalent electric and magnetic currents that radiate in the air,
for , with and ,
and for any
(10)
As it is right now, currents exist on the entire cutting plane
(xOy). The extraction of the electromagnetic field would re-
quire a two-dimensional integration over this infinite surface.
In this case, the external Wilcox sphere is extended toward in-
finity avoiding any use of the above expansions.
Most of the power radiated by the source on the (xOy) plane
is concentrated on its restriction to the disc delimited by the
internal Wilcox sphere. This is equivalent to restricting to
instead of infinity in (10). This restriction is from now on
applied. It is now possible to define an external Wilcox sphere
of finite radius.
The equivalent electromagnetic currents, obtained in (10), are
then projected on the basis as detailed in relation (4).
This leads to the following spherical modal coefficients:
(11)
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453
(12)
where and for are detailed in
Appendix I.
Using (6)–(8), the far field patterns and directivity can then
be deduced.
C. Coupling Effects of the Lens on the Feed
Up to now, it has been assumed that the lens is not disturbing
the feed. To the best of our knowledge, this approximation has
neither been fully justified nor numerically quantified in the lit-
erature. To overcome this, an iterative procedure, inspired by the
theory of small reflection [38], is described in Fig. 3.
The antenna is first analyzed in free space using any 3D full
wave software. A part of its excitation is reflected because of
mismatch. The other part radiates the incident field. Equiva-
lent electromagnetic currents are computed on a virtual box
enclosing the antenna in such a way that outside of this box,
now containing only free space, the same incident field is radi-
ated. The scatterer (in our case a lens) generates, as a reaction
to the incident field, a scattered one everywhere including in-
side the virtual box. At this point, the scattered field inside the
box is replaced by its equivalent currents on the same box. Fi-
nally, the antenna is placed back in the box. A reaction field
is generated involving inward and backward waves inside the
antenna that correct the initial excitation to close the loop. In
theory, the steady state is reached after an infinite number of it-
erations. However, in practice, corrections obtained after a cer-
tain number of iterations become insignificant.
It is important to emphasize that this iterative procedure is not
limited to lenses, but is general enough to be applied to any kind
of scatterer (dielectric, magnetic and/or metallic) of any shape.
IV. NUMERICAL RESULTS
Now we shall apply the previously developed theory in order
to highlight significant numerical results namely the series trun-
cation order, near field mappings, lens reaction to the feed and
computation load.
A. Truncation Order
When numerically implemented, all series require a trun-
cation order . This integer is always linked to the electromag-
netic length of the analyzed structure, where is the wave
number and the radius of the smallest sphere centered on the
origin and enclosing all structures. Thus, Lo [39] suggests to set
. However, Bruning and Hanson [40], [41] show that
454 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2008
Fig. 3. Iterative procedure to reach the steady state of any scatterer-feed system.
(a) Initially (p = 1) the antenna, with a V = 1 V excitation, is analyzed in
free space by any 3D commercial software. This provides the reflection (V )
and the electromagnetic field (E ; H ) in the entire space. (b) Equivalent cur-
rents (J ; J ) for the external problem are then computed on a virtual surface
S enclosing the feed. The hatchings inside S stands for the external problem.
These currents are chosen in such a way that with their presence, the box con-
tains only free space. (c) The addition of a scatterer (here a lens) generates, as a
reaction on the excitation, a scattered field everywhere including inside S . (d)
Now, equivalent currents (J ; J ), associated with the scattered field for the
internal problem, hence the hatchings outside S , are computed on S . (e) The
antenna is placed back into S . It generates a reaction field (E ; H ) repre-
sented by inward and backward scattering waves (V ; V ). They then cor-
rect the initial excitation to restart the loop in order to reach the steady state
after, in theory, a infinite number of iterations.
for some cases, a higher truncation order needs to be considered:
. In these references, the criterion leading to
the truncation order is not mentioned. For all presented results,
the largest order was applied and has been successfully checked.
B. Lens Reaction to the Feed
To reach the steady state of any scatterer-feed system, the it-
erative procedure, detailed in Fig. 3, is applied to a three-shell
half Maxwell fish-eye lens fed by a WR10 open-ended wave-
guide.
The far-field patterns of this lens antenna, computed both
with and without correction of the excitation, are superimposed,
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Fig. 4. Far field radiation patterns of a three shell half Maxwell fish-eye lens
fed by a WR10 open-ended waveguide, for a source-lens distance of 0.375  .
These patterns are computed ( ) without and (+) with a correction of the
excitation after the first iteration of the procedure described in Fig. 3.
TABLE I
SCATTERER—FEED REACTION QUANTIFICATION
as shown in Fig. 4. This means that the field distribution, in
the close neighborhood of feed aperture, is not significantly
modified. Indeed, the metallic boundary conditions, imposed
by the feed, are dominant in this small region compared to
boundary conditions imposed by the presence of the lens. Even
though the spatial field distribution is not significantly modified
when adding the lens, the back scattered power corrects its
level. Table I shows that for a source placed between
and far from the lens, the back scattered field power is four
hundred times lower than the incident one. The correction of
the excitation field level is therefore negligible. The steady state
of the lens-feed system is already reached.
This lens correction is a direct translation of considering the
central shell as a lens and all the others as matching layers that
limit reflections to the feed.
C. Field Mappings
To highlight the focusing effects of inhomogeneous lenses,
near field mappings of stratified lenses are now presented. The
parameters of these lenses, permittivity and external radius of
each shell, are reported in Table II.
The electric field distribution in the neighborhood of a five-
shell 10 -diameter Luneburg lens illuminated by a plane wave
is shown in Fig. 5. The energy of the incoming plane wave is
progressively concentrated toward the focal point located on the
axis at the opposite side of the lens. There are three distinct
zones as follows.
• The focal zone, , that concentrates most of
the incoming energy on the lens. This is where an antenna
has to be placed to optimize the reception;
• The decoupled zone, , in which any antenna
will not significantly modify the field in the focal region.
This is where additional antennas have to be placed to have
decoupled multiple beams;
• The blocking zone, , where any antenna
shadows a part of the energy.
FUCHS et al.: SCATTERING OF SPHERICALLY AND HEMISPHERICALLY STRATIFIED LENSES
TABLE II
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LENSES
Fig. 5. Normalized total electric field magnitude distribution, for both E- and
H-plane, in the neighborhood of a five-shell 10  -diameter Luneburg lens ex-
+
cited by a plane wave arriving from z .
The electric field above the flat side of a three-shell 6.15 -di-
ameter half Maxwell fish-eye lens fed by a WR10 waveguide
is mapped in Fig. 6(a). The uniform magnitude and phase of
the co-polarization translates the local plane wave behavior at
the upper surface of the lens. The spherical propagation of the
wave is clearly visible outside . The magnitude drop and
phase change for the co-polarization is due to the diffraction on
the flange of the waveguide also noticeable in Fig. 8(e). The
white regions stand for the nonconvergent Wilcox zones.
From this two-dimensional mapping, we extract that 86.8%
of the current density generated by the source is concentrated on
the portion of the (xOy) surface delimited by the internal Wilcox
zone of radius in Fig. 6(a).
Fig. 6(b) is the electric field magnitude extracted from
Fig. 6(a). We notice that most of the energy is concentrated
inside the lens. Moreover, the lens does not modify the polar-
ization, since for both E- and H-plane, the cross polarization
remains at least 20 dB lower than the co-polarization.
The total electric field magnitude for both the E- and H-plane
of the same lens antenna is mapped in Fig. 7. On the upper part,
dominant radiation directions are seen. They correspond to the
side lobe levels of Fig. 9(e) and (f). Moreover, the spillover of
the feed radiation is low. On the lower part, the focalization in-
side the lens, the low back-radiated field as well as the diffrac-
tion effects on the flange are visible. In addition, the reactive
zone of the lens antenna, where the fields have a strong radial
dependence, is mapped.
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455
D. Computation Time and Load Considerations
The computation times to analyze lens antennas, using CST
Microwave Studio, Ansoft HFSS and our scalar non-optimized
MMT based code, are investigated.
To that purpose, 3-shell Luneburg and half Maxwell fish-eye
lenses fed by an open-ended waveguide are simulated and the
computation time ratio between the commercial software and
the MMT, and , are reported in Table III. From 6
-diameter lens antennas, the computation time gain is already
interesting. Moreover, with our computer, we cannot simulate
lenses whose diameter exceeds, 16 with CST Microwave
Studio, and, 10 with Ansoft HFSS, whereas the MMT has
no limitation in terms of electric size of lenses.
In addition, to give an insight of the computation load, the
number of unknown modal coefficients in our computer code,
, the number of meshnodes in CST Microwave Studio,
, and the number of tetrahedra in Ansoft HFSS, ,
to analyze the same lens antennas, are given in Table IV.
Both computation time and memory load reduction justifies
the interest in the MMT.
V. VALIDATION
In this Section, experimental verifications and comparisons
with commercial software of the MMT results are performed
for the feed modeling and the scattering by stratified lenses.
A. Feed Modeling
1) Pyramidal Horn at 50 GHz: The currents of a horn,
Fig. 8(a), are sampled on the aperture and then expanded on
spherical wave functions using (4). A good agreement between
the spherical wave expansion and measurement is obtained for
both E- and H-plane far field radiation patterns as shown in
Fig. 8(b) and (c).
2) WR10 Open-Ended Waveguide at 77 GHz: From a 3D
full wave electromagnetic software, the currents are extracted
on a box enclosing the waveguide, Fig. 8(d). The expansion on
spherical wave functions leads also to an excellent agreement as
reported in Fig. 8(e) and (f). The low level discrepancies around
in Fig. 8(f), that are of numerical kind, can be avoided by
having a smaller discretization of the currents on the Huygens
box surrounding the feed.
3) Aperture Coupled Microstrip 2 2 Patch Array at 48.7
GHz: The previous technique is applied to the patch array de-
picted Fig. 8(g). The far field patterns from the MMT are very
close to those of CST as shown in Fig. 8(h) and (i). The discrep-
ancies on Fig. 8(h) at are of the same numerical kind
than the ones shown on Fig. 8(f).
B. Stratified Lens Scattering
1) Luneburg Lens (Spherical): The E- and H-plane far field
radiation patterns of a 6-shell 8 -diameter Luneburg lens,
Fig. 9(a), have been computed using the MMT, simulated with
CST Microwave Studio and measured at 6 GHz. They are su-
perimposed in both planes as shown in Fig. 9(b) and (c). Other
commercial software, namely Ansoft HFSS and FEKO, have
also been used to analyze these lenses. Their results, being very
close to those found by CST Microwave Studio, are not plotted
for clarity. The directivity determined by the MMT equals 27.3
456 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2008

Fig. 6. Near field mapping analysis at 77 GHz of a three-shell 6.15  -diameter half Maxwell fish-eye lens fed by a WR10 waveguide. (a) Two-dimensional
mapping of the normalized electric field in magnitude and phase for both co- and cross- polarization on the plane z = 0 . The intermediate zone (in white)
contains the source and is located between the inner and outer Wilcox spheres (of radius r and r respectively) in which the field cannot be expanded on
~ N~ g. (b) Electric field magnitude cuts are extracted from the two-dimensional mapping for both co- (solid line) and cross- (dashed line) polarization and two
fM;
angles: ' = 0 (+) and 90 ( ).

Studio and measured at 77 GHz. The E-and H-plane far field ra-
diation patterns, reported in Fig. 9(e) and (f), are in good agree-
ment. The discrepancies between commercial software and the
MMT on the side lobe levels come from the loss of informa-
tion on the currents due to the restriction in (10).
The directivity obtained by MMT equals 21.9 dB and 22.3 dB is
calculated by CST Microwave Studio. The differences between
the MMT/commercial software and measurements are the con-
sequence of the uncertainties on both distance and alignment
between the lens and the feed: these parameters are indeed very
sensitive at W band.
This 3-shell lens is fed by an aperture coupled microstrip
patch array at 48.7 GHz as shown in Fig. 9(g). The far field pat-
terns obtained by MMT and CST Microwave Studio, reported
in Fig. 9(h) and (i), are close.

Fig. 7. Two-dimensional mapping of the normalized total electric field magni-
tude for both E- and H-plane in the neighborhood of the lens antenna shown in
Fig. 6. For the lower plane (z < 0), the source is represented by the virtual box
S corresponding to the Huygens surface. This imposes two Wilcox spheres
of convergence (delimited by r and r ) between which the field cannot be
expanded (lower white regions). For the upper plane (z > 0), the sources are
represented by their equivalent currents on z = 0. A change of the coordinate
system (translation OO ~ ) is performed to reduce the zone of indetermination.
This results in new Wilcox spheres (r and r ) enclosing the equivalent cur-
rent surface.
dB, whereas 27.5 dB is predicted by all three commercial soft-
ware.
2) Half Maxwell Fish-Eye Lens (Hemispherical): A 3-shell
6.15 -diameter half Maxwell fish-eye lens, Fig. 9(d), has also
been computed using the MMT, simulated with CST Microwave
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C. Return Loss
As evoked in Section IV-B, the return loss of the feed is
slightly disturbed when the lens is added. In the case of the
Luneburg lens, this perturbation is below the sensitivity of the
characterization devices. For the half Maxwell fish-eye lens, the
return loss alteration is lower than 1 dB over the 76–81 GHz fre-
quency band.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper has presented an analytical method to study the
scattering by stratified spherical and hemispherical lenses fed
by any real source. The method described is a Mode Matching
Technique based on spherical wave functions.
Each step, such as the field expansion for any real source,
the scattering by stratified spherical lenses (Luneburg) and the
extension to hemispherical ones (half Maxwell fish-eye), has
been numerically checked and experimentally verified.
Thus, numerical results are exhibited to highlight some prop-
erties of inhomogeneous lenses. Near field mappings show the
progressive focusing by both a Luneburg and a half Maxwell
FUCHS et al.: SCATTERING OF SPHERICALLY AND HEMISPHERICALLY STRATIFIED LENSES 457

Fig. 8. Far field comparisons (left: E plane and right: H plane) between the computed by MMT ( ) and measured ( 0 0 0) 50 GHz horn (b) and (c), the
computed by MMT ( ) and simulated with CST Microwave Studio ( ) open-ended WR10 waveguide at 77 GHz (e) and (f), and aperture coupled microstrip
patch array at 48.7 GHz (h) and (i), with a 3D view of (a) the horn, (d) the open-ended waveguide and (g) both top and cut view of the array.

TABLE III TABLE IV

COMPUTATION TIME COMPARISON COMPUTATION LOAD COMPARISON

N : number of unknown modal coefficients.

N : number of meshnodes.
Computations done on a 2.79 GHz-CPU 3.99 GHz-RAM Xeon x64. N : number of tetrahedra.
r =t =t , with CST Microwave Studio 2006B. NC: no convergence.
r =t =t , with Ansoft HFSS v.10.1.

Note that when computing the scattering by hemispherically

fish-eye lens. Furthermore, a general technique to take into ac- stratified lenses, the spillover of the feed has to be low to yield
count the reaction of the feed to the scatterer is detailed and ap- accurate results. To overcome this limitation, a semi-analytical
plied to the lens antenna investigated. On the top of providing a method allowing one to directly deal with arbitrary shaped strat-
controlled accuracy, the presented method is fast and requires a ified lenses, relying also on mode matching in terms of spherical
low memory load compared to commercial software. modes, is now under investigation.
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458 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2008

Fig. 9. Far field comparisons (left E-plane and right H-plane) between the computed by MMT (+), simulated with CST Microwave Studio ( ) and measured
000
[co-pol ( 111
) and cross-pol ( )] of an open-ended waveguide feeding: (b),(c) a six-shell 8  -diameter Luneburg lens at 6 GHz, (e),(f) a three-shell 6.15
 -diameter half Maxwell fish-eye lens at 77 GHz, and (h),(i) half Maxwell fish-eye lens fed by an array patch with (a) a sideview of the measured Luneburg lens
antenna in the anechoic chamber (photograph), a 3D view of the simulated half Maxwell fish-eye lens fed by (c) a waveguide and (g) a patch array.

APPENDIX I
COEFFICIENTS DETAILS
The coefficients used in (11) and (12) are detailed as follows:

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Benjamin Fuchs (S’07–M’08) was born in Rennes,
France, in 1981. He received the Diplôme d’In-
génieur degree in signal processing and telecommu-
nications and the Research Master Diploma from the
Institut National des Sciences Appliquées, Rennes,
France, in 2004. He is currently working toward
the Ph.D. degree at the Institute of Electronics and
Telecommunications of Rennes (IETR), University
of Rennes 1.
His research interests include mode matching tech-
niques, millimeter-wave focusing and multibeam an-
tennas. His work focuses on the design and analysis inhomogeneous dielectric
lens antennas.
Sébastien Palud (S’07) was born in Quimper,
France, in 1981. He received the Telecommunica-
tions Engineering degree and the Master Diploma in
telecommunications and electronics from the Ecole
Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de
Bretagne (ENST Bretagne), Plouzané, France, in
2005, and is currently working toward the Ph.D.
degree at the Institute of Electronics and Telecom-
munications of Rennes (IETR), University of Rennes
1.
His research interests concern printed antenna ar-
rays, inhomogeneous lenses and compact wideband antennas. His work focuses
on wideband VHF and UHF antennas for interception and jamming applica-
tions.
Laurent Le Coq was born on February 17, 1972. He
received the Electronics Engineer and Ph.D. degrees
from the INSA of Rennes, Rennes, France, in 1995
and 1999, respectively.
In 1999, he joined Institute of Electronics and
Telecommunications of Rennes (IETR), University
of Rennes 1, as a Research Lab Engineer, where he
is responsible for measurement technical facilities
up to 110 GHz.
460 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 56, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2008
Olivier Lafond received the French DEA (Master)
diploma in radar and telecommunication from the
University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in 1996 and
the Ph.D. degree in signal processing and telecom-
munication from the University of Rennes 1, in
2000.
Since October 2002, he has been Assistant Pro-
fessor of the Institute of Electronics and Telecom-
munications of Rennes (IETR), University of Rennes
1. His areas of interest are passive and active mil-
limeter-waves antennas and circuits. His research in-
terests also multibeam and reconfigurable antennas, inhomogeneous lenses and
substrate characterization techniques for millimeter waves applications.
Mohamed Himdi received the Ph.D. degree in signal
processing and telecommunications from the Univer-
sity of Rennes 1, Rennes, France, in 1990.
Since 2003, he has been a Professor at the
University of Rennes 1, and the Head of the High
Frequency and Antenna Department at the Institute
of Electronics and Telecommunications of Rennes
(IETR), University of Rennes 1. His research activ-
ities concern the passive and active millimeter-wave
antennas. His research interests also theoretical and
applied computational electromagnetics, develop-
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ment of new architectures of printed antenna arrays and new 3-D antenna
technologies. He is the author and coauthor of 45 journal papers and more than
120 papers in conference proceedings.
Sébastien Rondineau (M’04) received the Diplôme
d’Ingénieur en Informatique et téléCommunications
degree in signal processing and telecommunications
and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Rennes
1, Rennes, France, in 1999 and 2002, respectively.
He was research fellow at the University of Col-
orado, Boulder, from 2002 to 2006. Currently, he is
a Research Assistant Professor at the Microwave and
Active Antenna Laboratory, Electrical and Computer
Engineering Department, University of Colorado at
Boulder. His research interests include the method
of analytical regularization in computational electromagnetics, mode matching,
conformal mapping, micro-scale interconnects, Butler matrices, propagation
and scattering of waves, homogeneous and inhomogenous dielectric lenses,
discrete lens arrays and antennas, dispersion controlled 2D Rotman lenses,
metamaterials, non-linear polymers applied to rectification-modulation for
laser, THz, and wave signals.