Sinusoidally Modulated Hybrid Plasmonic Leaky Wave Optical Antenna

A sinusoidally modulated optical leaky wave antenna is proposed to operate at the standard optical communication wavelength of 1550 nm. In order to have a beam in the desired direction, and simultaneously, control the side lobe level, a new algorithm is proposed in which the holographic method is modified based on Taylor distribution. The antenna is designed based on hybrid plasmonics structures leading to a high efficiency for the proposed structure. The proposed optical antenna is numerically analyzed using a full wave simulation. The numerical results show a gain of 10 dB, an impedance bandwidth of 28%, and a side lobe level of −17 dB, for the proposed antenna. The proposed antenna can have applications in integrated optical interconnects, highly integrated LIDARS, optical wireless communication, and plasmonics solar cells.