Submillimeter Wave Antenna With Slow Wave Feed Line

Submillimeter wave radiation, which is also referred to as terahertz radiation, has not been extensively explored until recently due to a lack of reliable components and devices in this frequency range. Current advances in technology have made it possible to explore this portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and to create innovative imaging and sensing techniques that hold enormous potential in biomedical, metrological and security applications.

Considering that realization of submillimeter wave components and antennas is still heavily constrained by problems arising from technological limitations and the necessity of having extremely miniaturized circuit elements, the design process remains quite challenging. In this paper, a design of a submillimeter wave antenna fed by a slow wave structure is described.

The antenna is useful in high-power THz applications because of its ability to directly radiate energy from a vane-type interaction structure of a vacuum electron device. The parameters of the antenna are optimized while taking the technological constraints into account.