Experimental Study of the Invariants of the Time-Reversal Operator for a Dielectric Cylinder Using Separate Transmit and Receive Arrays

The decomposition of the time reversal operator (DORT method) is applied to electromagnetic waves in order to characterize a dielectric cylinder. It consists in determining the Time Reversal Invariants of the Time Reversal Operator. Here, this matrix is built from the inter-element responses between distinct transmit and receive arrays. In this paper experimental results obtained between 2 and 4 GHz are compared to a theoretical model, developed in an other paper (Minonzio , ??Theory of the time-reversal operator for a dielectric cylinder using separate transmit and receive arrays,?? IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., vol. 57, pp. 2331-2340, 2009). The DORT method is then applied to an inverse problem to determine the diameter and the permittivity of the cylinder. It is shown experimentally that different experimental parameters can be estimated from the singular values of the time reversal operator.