Analytical Representation of Characteristic Modes Decomposition

Aspects of the theory of characteristic modes, based on their variational formulation, are presented and an explicit form of a related functional, involving only currents in a spatial domain, is derived. The new formulation leads to deeper insight into the modal behavior of radiating structures as demonstrated by a detailed analysis of three canonical structures: a dipole, an array of two dipoles and a loop, cylinder and a sphere. It is demonstrated that knowledge of the analytical functional can be utilized to solve important problems related to the theory of characteristic modes decomposition such as the resonance of inductive modes or the benchmarking of method of moments code.