Design and analysis of a super wideband (0.09−30.14 THz) graphene based log periodic dipole array antenna for terahertz applications

A micro-scaled printed log periodic dipole array (LPDA) antenna is proposed for terahertz (THz) applications. The proposed low profile graphene conductor based LPDA antenna is designed with integrated protudent dipoles to realize super wide bandwidth and high gain characteristics. The suggested THz antenna is designed on a 10 µm thick Rogers RT / Duroid 5880 ™ substrate material of dimension 450 µm × 500 µm. The proposed antenna exhibits 2:1 VSWR operating super wide bandwidth (SWB) of 30050 GHz (0.09–30.14 THz) with a peak gain of 16.02 dBi. The designed antenna shows fractional bandwidth of 199.46% along with a huge bandwidth ratio of 334.88:1. The radiation efficiency balancing from 85% to 98.2% is maintained throughout the whole operating –10 dB SWB (0.09–30.14 THz). Design formulation of the proposed structure, structural parametric analysis, surface current distribution and characteristics parameters are discussed in detail in this paper. The proposed antenna covers the entire frequency band of the terahertz region to support a number of sub-terahertz and terahertz communication applications such as high speed short distance communication, video rate imaging, biomedical imaging, surveillance, mine detection, sensing, and security scanning.