Dr. Michael B. Steer has been awarded $450,000 by the US Army – Army Research Office for research on Time-Frequency and Non-Laplacian Phenomena at Radio Frequencies.

The award will run from September 30th, 2012 to August 31st, 2016.

Research Abstract

Recent phenomenological investigations of the fundamental limits to the performance of radio, radar and sensor systems have revealed radio-frequency (RF) interference effects that do not have the expected integer calculus descriptions.  Some of these effects derive from electro-thermal diffusive interactions and it is believed that many other effects similarly derive from diffusion. Also, time-frequency effects have been discovered in which the temporal response of electronics excited by a pulsed RF signal is significantly longer than linear frequency-domain analysis would imply. It is believed that these derive from diffusion-like effects as well and require fractional calculus.  The project’s premise is that using integer calculus-based analysis has resulted in sources of interference in RF systems being missed.  This project investigates the underlying physics of diffusive RF phenomena. Time-domain fractional calculus-based descriptions transformed into the frequency-domain become non-Laplacian (i.e. non-integer-based).  However, conventional analysis of RF structures is based on integer-based Laplacian frequency-domain analysis derived from integer calculus.   The project extends the engineer’s RF analysis toolkit to include non-Laplacian models and abstractions. The work will lead to new paradigms for understanding interference at RF, for enhancing RF systems, for deriving fundamental limits of performance at RF, for developing signatures, and for manipulating RF electronics.