Super-Beamforming in Holographic MIMO

Abstract

The conventional linear scaling of beamforming gain with the number of antennas is not a fundamental physical limitation, but rather a consequence of the half-wavelength spacings that minimize mutual coupling. Relaxing this constraint facilitates beamforming gains exceeding those of uncoupled arrays along specific directions. This paper shows that, when antenna losses remain sufficiently small, mutual coupling enables the synthesis of super-beams whose endfire gain scales quadratically with the number of antennas. Notably, this quadratic scaling does not necessarily require vanishing spacings, but emerges for spacings slightly below half wavelength as the array aperture increases.