Modeling Plasmonic Antennas for the Millimeterwave & THz Range

Abstract

Plasmonic modulator antennas have been recentlyshown to be able to efficiently upmix millimeter and THz waves onto optical frequencies. In this paper, we introduce a theory and equivalent circuit models for designing and optimizing plasmonic modulator antennas. The proposed model aims to improve the overall understanding of the experimentally found powerful antenna field enhancement (between the impinging field at the antenna and the field within the modulator). This enhancement has already been shown to be as high as 90'000 and allows to efficiently evaluate relevant figures of merit for antenna design and optimization. The effects of antenna design parameters are presented and discussed in detail. The accuracy of the suggested models is verified by rigorous numerical computation through field simulations. As a result, we propose optimized antenna structures and their parameters, and demonstrate their field enhancement capabilities.

Thin-film lithium niobate electro-optic terahertz wave detector

“…State-of-the art EO THz waves detectors using LN and/or photonic integration are represented by device concepts where the incident THz wave electric field is locally enhanced using plasmonic antennas 27 – 30 and plasmonics 31 . Our research objective aims at advancing the state-of-the-art by the development of a photonic integrated, fully dielectric EO sensor.…”

Plasmonic Electro-Optic Modulators – A Review

“…Plasmonic RF-to-Optical Antenna: Last but not least, it is possible to combine a plasmonic modulator and a mm-wave antenna with a pronounced field enhancement capabilities, as presented in [58], [55]. This enables future field sensors capable of detecting and measuring RF waves up to highest frequencies.…”

“…The plasmonic modulator built by a single metal layer is shown as an inset [54]. (c) Plasmonic modulator embedded into the slot of a bow-tie antenna for sensing RF fields up to 500 GHz [55] and even 2.4 THz [5].…”