Use of Terahertz Photoconductive Sources to Characterize Tunable Graphene RF Plasmonic Antennas

Graphene, owing to its ability to support plasmon polariton waves in the terahertz frequency range, enables the miniaturization and electrical tunability of antennas to allow wireless communications among nanosystems. One of the main challenges in the characterization and demonstration of graphene antennas is finding suitable terahertz sources to feed the antenna. This paper characterizes the performance of a graphene RF plasmonic antenna fed with a photoconductive source. The terahertz source is modeled and, by means of a full-wave EM solver, the radiated power as well as the tunable resonant frequency of the device is estimated with respect to material, laser illumination, and antenna geometry parameters. The results show that with this setup the antenna radiates terahertz pulses with an average power up to 1 μW and shows promising electrical frequency tunability.

I. Introduction

Graphene has recently attracted intense attention of the research community due to its extraordinary mechanical, electronic and optical properties [1]. One particularly promising research field is that of graphene-enabled wireless communications. The interconnection of nanosystems, i.e., integrated systems with a size of a few micrometers, has several applications, such as enabling wireless nanosensor networks [8] or wireless communications in network-on-chip environments [9].