Enhanced terahertz radiation from an elliptical-beam-illuminated sawtooth photoconductive antenna: design and numerical analysis

Abstract: The enhanced terahertz radiation from a new photoconductive antenna (PCA) has been predicted by numerical simulation. Different from the conventional PCA, the proposed PCA has electrodes with sawtooth structures on the edge, which will introduce stronger localized bias field than common electrode (e.g. strip-line structure). In addition, the elliptical beam of the laser source is used to illuminate the sawtooth structure of the PCA, so that the effective region of the terahertz excitation is enlarged and higher laser power can be applied before saturation effect occurs. The design of the proposed PCA is presented, and its performance is predicated by numerical analysis based on the full-wave finite-difference-time-domain method. The simulated result shows that, comparing with a conventional PCA, the proposed PCA achieves $1.4$ times enhancement of the THz radiation field(i.e. peak of the time-domain THz pulse) at the same condition. Further enhancement as high as $2$ times can be achieved when considering the upper limit of the power density of the incoming laser beam.