A slot fed terahertz dielectric resonator antenna driven by an optimized photomixer is proposed, and the interaction of the laser and photomixer is studied. It is demonstrated that in a continuous wave terahertz photomixing scheme, the generated THz power is proportional to the 4th power of the surface electric field of photocondutive layer. Consequently, the optical to THz conversion efficiency of the proposed photomixer has an enhancement factor of 487. This is due to the fact that the surface electric field of the proposed photomixer with a 2D-Photonic Crystal (PhC) superstrate has been improved from 2.1 to 9.9 V/m, which represents a substantial improvement. Moreover, the electrically thick Gallium-Arsenide (GaAs) supporting substrate of the device has been truncated to create a dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) that offers a typical radiation efficiency of more than 90%. By employing a traditional coplanar strip (CPS) biasing network, the matching efficiency has been improved to 24.4%. Therefore, the total efficiency has been considerably improved due to the enhancements in the laser-to-THz conversion, as well as radiation and matching efficiencies. Further, the antenna gain has been improved to 9dBi at the presence of GaAs superstrate. Numerical comparisons show that the proposed antenna can achieve a high gain with relatively smaller dimensions compared with traditional THz antenna with Si lens.
Keywords: dielectric resonator antenna; frequency selective surface superstrate; photomixer; terahertz antenna; terahertz source; two dimensional photonic crystal.