Excitation and manipulation of toroidal dipole response in an antenna

The toroidal dipole is always overlooked due to its relatively weak interaction with the electromagnetic fields, but it actually exhibits tremendous potential for the design of advanced photonic devices. Here, we demonstrate the existence of toroidal dipole in plasma antenna system, which is rarely observed in the antenna design. It consists of a half-wavelength antenna and eight plasma rings to excite the toroidal dipole to enhance the electromagnetic radiation of the whole antenna system, whose mechanism is different from conventional antenna, which is a multiband antenna. We further confirm that the hybrid mode, which combines the toroidal dipole and multipole moments, can be dynamically adjusted to control both return loss and the opening of operating windows. This allows for flexible tuning of the multiband antenna simply by manipulating the response of the toroidal dipole. Furthermore, the toroidal dipole antenna is stable in dusty plasma, making it suitable for solving the problem of ‘blackout’ phenomena in aerospace communications, which exhibits the additional benefits of reduced cost and easier to manufacture.