Jean-Baptiste Gros

Reverberation chambers are currently involved in a large variety of applications ranging from computational imaging to electromagnetic (EM) compatibility testing as well as the characterization of antenna efficiency, wireless devices or MIMO systems . In most of the above mentioned applications, the related measurements are based on statistical averages and their fluctuations. We introduce a very efficient mode stirring process based on electronically reconfigurable metasurfaces (ERMs) developed by the young start-up GREENERWAVE . By locally changing the field boundary conditions, the ERMs allow to generate a humongous number of uncorrelated field realizations even within small reverberation chambers. We fully experimentally characterize this stirring process by determining the number of uncorrelated realizations via the autocorrelation function of the transmissions. Thanks to the huge size of uncorrelated samples thus produced, we are able to experimentally investigate the extreme value statistics of the EM field very precisely and compare them with theorical predictions deduced from the random matrix theory (RMT). Based on the fluctuations of field's maxima, the IEC-standard uniformity criterion parameter $\sigma_\textrm{dB}$ is for instance investigated and reveals the performance of the stirring with ERM's. We compare the experimental results on the uniformity criterion parameter with a corresponding RMT model where the only parameter, the modal overlap, is extracted via the quality factor. We find a very good agreement.