A wideband and high-gain fully metallic lens antenna for terahertz applications

In this letter, a high-gain fully metallic lens antenna operating in 110-170 GHz frequency range is designed and fabricated. The antenna is composed of a feeding E-plane horn, a metallic lens and a flared H-plane horn. The metallic lens consisting of oblique metal plates and two horn arrays is used to compensate the phase difference in the E-plane. A prototype is fabricated in aluminium by low-cost computer numerical control milling technology. Experiments are carried out to verify the design. Measurement results of the prototype show that the proposed antenna can achieve a wide impedance bandwidth of 42.85% across 110-170 GHz with an input reflection coefficient below -10 dB. In addition, the maximum gain is 29.2 dBi at 170 GHz. These performances of the proposed antenna indicate the potential for terahertz applications.