UC Irvine

Green's functions based on truncated periodicity play an important role in the efficient analysis of radiation from, or scattering by, phased-array antennas, frequency selective surfaces and related applications. Such Green's functions exploit the equivalence between summation over the contributions from individual elements in an array and their collective treatment via Poisson summation in terms of an infinite series of Floquet waves (FW). While numerous explorations have been carried out in the frequency domain (FD), much less has been done for transient excitation. In order to gain understanding of the FW critical parameters and phenomenologies governing time-domain (TD) periodicity, we consider the simple canonical problem of radiation from an infinite periodic line array of sequentially pulsed axial dipoles. This problem can be solved in closed form and also by a variety of alternative representations, which include inversion from the FD, spectral decomposition into TD plane waves, the complex space-time analytic signal formulation, and the Cagniard-de Hoop method. These alternatives, some of which apply traditionally only for nondispersive TD events, are shown to still work here because of the special character of the FW dispersion. Particular attention is given to evanescent TD-FW's and their transition through cutoff. Asymptotic techniques grant insight into the TD-FW behavior by identifying their instantaneous frequencies, wavenumbers, and other physics-based parameterizations. A basic question concerns the definition of what constitutes a physically 'observable' (causal, etc.) TD-FW. The proposed answer is based on consistency among models arrived at by alternative routes.