Additive Manufacturing of a Terahertz Back-to-Back Horn Antenna for Use in Life Sciences

Abstract

A 3D-printed, 0.3 THz, back-to-back, smooth-walled, symmetric halves, with internal surfaces metallised with goldplate. The junction of the back-to-back horns hosts a 1 mm 2 microfluidic aperture for feeding analytes undergoing dielectric properties characterisation of typically solvated proteins. The configuration allows for enhanced beam-sample interaction and efficient detection than would be conventionally achieved with either traditional quasi-optical or cavity resonator circuits. The horn-pair was designed for 0.3-032 THz operation. It can, however, work over a wider domain of frequencies, namely, 0.2-0.32 THz, if restrictions on cross-polarisation and matching are relaxed. Initial measurements of the horn-pair have shown that there is an increase of 2.5 dB in the signal strength when the horn apertures are equidistant from the focusing mirrors of a defocused quasi-optical transmissometer system.

Design of on‐chip antennas for THz detector and source in CMOS (Invited paper)

“…Antenna is an important part of the THz transceiver system; off-chip antennas are commonly used such as horn antenna [9,10] and mirror reflector antenna However, this solution decreases the system integration, which limits the process of THz commercialisation. This limitation has inspired a lot of research on on-chip antennas.…”

Monolithically Integrated Coaxial Resonator-Based Filtennas Using SLA Three-Dimensional Printing

“…Metal-based AM process such as direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) [7] or selective laser melting (SLM) [8], [9] offers high mechanical robustness, but with relatively higher cost and low surface roughness. Ceramic based-or plastic/resin based-AM process [10] [11]- [17], PolyJet [18], and stereolithography apparatus (SLA) [19]- [21] exhibit significantly lower cost and weight. However, due the need for internal metallization they can only be implemented as split-block.…”