Spectral Approximation and Ergodic-Capacity Convergence of HMIMO Channels under Spatial-Wavenumber Domain Mismatch

Abstract

We establish quantitative results on finite-dimensional spectral approximation and ergodic-capacity convergence for continuous Holographic Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (HMIMO) channels with square apertures and physically prescribed circular wavenumber support. The resulting spatial-wavenumber domain mismatch leads to a non-separable square-disk concentration problem for which the classical separable construction based on prolate spheroidal wave functions (PSWFs) cannot be directly applied. We project the continuous operator onto a tensor-product subspace of one-dimensional (1D) PSWFs while preserving the circular wavenumber support, yielding a generally non-diagonal but highly sparse finite-dimensional matrix. We show that the whole-spectrum approximation error, accounting for retained-eigenvalue perturbations and the residual spectral tail, remains controlled by a 1D PSWF eigenvalue-tail envelope despite the loss of separability and induced off-diagonal coupling. Beyond an explicit 1D truncation threshold, this error decays super-exponentially. This analysis further yields an asymptotic upper envelope for the eigenspectrum under the flattened two-dimensional eigenvalue ordering. We further establish a non-asymptotic upper bound on the gap between the actual ergodic capacities of the continuous and tensor-PSWF-truncated channels under their respective transmit-covariance optimizations. Combined with the spectral result, this capacity-gap bound inherits the same super-exponential dependence on the truncation order. Finally, quadrature rules with explicit radial and angular node thresholds are developed for evaluating the projected matrix. Numerical results show that conventional truncation based on spatial degrees of freedom can omit performance-relevant modes, particularly for compact apertures.