Electronic Beam-Scanning Strip-Coded Graphene Leaky-Wave Antenna Using Single Structure

In this paper, a reconfigurable graphene leaky-wave antenna (GLWA) with electronic beam scanning capability for THz communications system is proposed. It consists of graphene strips printed on silicon oxide substrate and is fed by a planar H-plane horn antenna. The tunable graphene conductivity using DC-bias is used to control the GLWA-radiated beam direction without changing its physical structure. By selecting the proper periodicity of the biased/unbiased graphene strips (i.e., codes) of the GLWA, the beam direction, scanning range, gain, and SLL are changed without changing the array layout. A parametric study on the effect of GLWA dimensions on the radiation characteristics is studied. The radiated beam is electronically scanned from - 68 degrees to 26 degrees at a fixed frequency of 2 THz using different codes. The proposed antenna is simple in design, easy to control via the bias/unbiased periodic graphene strips. It has a compact size of 1350x300x35 mu m(3). The GLWA coded by 1111111000 has a peak gain of 19.7 dBi, SLL of - 10.8 dB and beam radiated in 8 degrees direction at 2 THz. The code 11111000 has beam scanning from - 35 degrees to - 3 degrees with frequency varying from 1.8 to 2.2 THz with 20.0 dBi gain. An investigation of the radiation characteristics of different codes of GLWA is introduced. The effect of GLWA feeding with substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) H-plane horn antenna that is compared with the ideal wave-port is studied. The GLWA with code 11111000 introduces BW of 21.95% (1.72-2.15 THz) with good impedance matching. The antenna structure is full-wave simulated and studied using the finite integral technique.