Manipulating the radiation pattern of patch antennas by exploiting phase singularities

In most applications the shape and the pointing direction of the antenna radiation pattern have a direct impact on the performance of the overall system. Therefore, the possibility to shape and rotate the radiation pattern of the radiating element is of interest for a multitude of different scenarios. In this contribution, we show how the radiation properties of patch antennas can be manipulated in a robust way through the phase singularities of vortex fields. In particular, we show that this can be accomplished by properly superimposing to the fundamental mode of a standard patch antenna, circularly polarized higher order modes exhibiting topological singularities.