Analysis and Design of Pulsed Photoconductive Antennas

Photoconductive antennas (PCA) are widely used in contemporary THz systems, especially in terahertz time-domain spectroscopy. They are used to radiate and receive THz power. The study of the generation and reception of THz radiation involves both semiconductor theory, electromagnetics, and antenna theory. In this work, after a review of some...

Norton Equivalent Circuit for Pulsed Photoconductive Antennas - Part II: Experimental Validation

This second part of two papers' sequence presents the experimental validation of the Norton equivalent circuit model for pulsed photoconductive antennas (PCAs) provided in the first paper of the sequence. To this goal, different prototypes of photoconductive antenna sources have been manufactured and assembled. The average powers radiated and...

Norton Equivalent Circuit for Pulsed Photoconductive Antennas-Part I: Theoretical Model

A novel equivalent circuit for pulsed photoconductive sources is introduced for describing the coupling between the photoconductive gap and the antenna. The proposed circuit effectively describes the mechanism of feeding the antenna by the semiconductor when this latter is illuminated by a laser operating in a pulsed mode. Starting from the...

A Connected Array of Coherent Photoconductive Pulsed Sources to Generate mW Average Power in the Submillimeter Wavelength Band

A pulsed photoconductive terahertz (THz) source is presented that is able to radiate milliwatt (mW) level average power over a large bandwidth, by exploiting both the optical and electrical properties of photoconductive sources and the ultrawideband properties of connected antenna arrays. An optical system composed of a microlenses array...

Time Domain Modeling of Photoconductive Antennas

Photoconductive antennas (PCAs) have been extensively utilized for the generation of broadband pulses over very large bandwidths. PCAs rely on a semiconductor (e.g. LT- GaAs) gap pumped by a laser and coupled to a passive structure biased at a certain voltage level. When the laser impinges on the semiconductor gap with an appropriate carrier...

GUI for System Dimensioning and QO Channel Analysis of Pulsed Pico-second Radar

THz time-domain systems driven by photoconductive antennas (PCAs) promise a bandwidth of the order of hundreds of GHz. This characteristic can be utilized to build see-through radars with sub-mm resolution and a field of view comparable to the current mm-wave radars at a relatively low cost. These radars can solve the issues in the field of...

Distributed Excitations of Pulsed Photo-Conductive Sources: The Time Domain Analysis

Distributed feeding in photo-conducting antennas (PCAs) leads to simple optical designs, less prone to overheating, as well to terahertz (THz) antennas that can operate non-dispersively over wide bandwidths. However, the efficient analysis of pulsed PCAs was so far limited to architectures characterized by feeds small with respect to the THz...