Towards the design of an imaging setup using photoconductive antennas

Master thesis (2022)

Authors

M.D. Huiskes Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

Nuria Llombart Tera-Hertz Sensing - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
A. Neto Tera-Hertz Sensing - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2022 Martijn Huiskes
PCA Imaging Photoconductive antenna
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Published Date

20-10-2022

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Photoconductive antennas (PCAs) are an interesting candidate for imaging systems due to their relatively low cost and ability to provide a bandwidth of hundreds of GHz. The large bandwidth of PCAs allows for sub-millimeter depth resolution. However, the often-used single-element PCAs are intrinsically limited in the amount of power they can radiate due to several saturation effects. To increase the radiated power, array-based PCAs have been introduced by the scientific community. In the first part of this work, the impact of adding a leaky wave cavity to a lens-coupled Photoconductive Connected Array (PCCA) is studied. The fields radiated by the lens are found using a Physical Optics method, and the effect of the lens on the energy spectra of the radiated fields is quantified. Measurements of two fabricated PCCA geometries are compared with simulations. In the second part of this work, an imaging setup is designed to benchmark several state-of-the-art PCAs. Subsequently, the coupling between two PCAs in an imaging setup is studied via a field-matching formalism.