Integrated Microcomb-Driven Vortex Electromagnetic Waves for Broadband Forward-looking Sensing

Microwave sensing is a critical enabler for all-weather perception, yet its resolution is severely limited when relative motion or large effective apertures are unavailable. Vortex electromagnetic (EM) waves can provide additional azimuthal discrimination, but practical deployment is constrained by the trade-off between bandwidth, mode purity, and hardware complexity. Here, we propose a microwave photonic architecture enabled by a chip-scale dissipative Kerr soliton microcomb that resolves these constraints. The microcomb provides more than 100 optical lines with linewidths below 30 kHz. By optically processing these carriers, we synthesize vortex waves covering an 8 GHz bandwidth (18–26 GHz) with 15 programmable orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes. Compared with a conventional implementations, our approach exhibits higher OAM purity and improved field integrity across the band, while condensing the multi-wavelength source onto a monolithic chip. We demonstrate superior forward-looking imaging performance, clearly resolving both point targets and complex scenes. This work bridges integrated soliton physics with broadband microwave processing, establishing a scalable framework for next-generation compact, high-performance smart sensors.