Enhanced Frequency Response in Coherent Photoconductive Pulsed Sources Using Leaky Wave Connected Arrays

Current time-domain systems based on photoconductive antennas relate their performance to the amount of THz power that they can generate as well as to their dynamic range. Although these are important parameters to characterize such systems, the quality of the beam patterns generated by them, and their spectral response are usually not taken into consideration during the design. This results in high dispersion or low radiation efficiency due to the poor coupling between the transmitter and receiver PCAs over the large bandwidth at which they operate. Photoconductive connected array (PCCA) sources have previously shown to enable THz radiation with mW power level and clean beam patterns. In this article, we present the design, fabrication, and characterization of a novel PCCA design, where a leaky wave cavity is added to the structure to further increase the bandwidth of operation. The performance of the leaky enhanced design is improved with respect to the previous design.