Optical Scale Polarimetric Device for Nanotube Forest Measurement: An Opportunity to Anticipate Bistatic Polarimetric SAR Images of Tree Trunk Forests at P-Band

Abstract : This paper investigates a new polarimetric device that produces reduced scale measurements for bistatic radar. The optical scale device is proposed to overcome the lack of real bistatic and full polarimetric radar acquisitions for forest of trunks. It is based on the scale invariant rule that is deduced from the Maxwell equations. From this principle, the electromagnetic (EM) response is kept at the reduced scale if the illumination wavelength is scaled and if the permittivity remains the same. This last condition needs the use of a carefully chosen material at optical scale. Nanoscale scenes are composed of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). They present several advantages: their arrangement is similar to the structure of a forest of trunks, their shape, and density can be controlled, it is possible to create very large scenes composed of thousands of elements, and finally their permittivity at optical wavelength is about the same order of magnitude than the permittivity of the tree trunks at radar wavelength. They are measured under the view of a microscope objective with a 633-nm wavelength laser playing the role of the EM source. The device images at once the forest polarimetric response, for a given transmitter location, and for the entire set of angular positions of reception. Two samples of forests with different densities are measured. They are analyzed using the Cloude and Pottier decomposition and the Lu and Chipman decomposition. The produced results are unprecedented on forest-like environment and it would be very helpful for the radar community.