Engineering electromagnetic wave properties using subwavelength antennas structures

Date of Award

2015

Degree Name

Ph.D. in Electro-Optics

Department

Department of Electro-Optics and Photonics

Advisor/Chair

Advisor: Qiwen Zhan

Abstract

With extraordinary properties, generation of complex electromagnetic field based on novel subwavelength antennas structures has attracted great attentions in many areas of modern nano science and technology, such as compact RF sensors, micro-wave receivers and nano-antenna-based optical/IR devices.This dissertation is mainly composed of two parts. For the first part, the idea of plasmonic localization in optical range is transferred and utilized for generating confined fields with high enhancement in RF range. A subwavelength modified bowtie antenna in RF range is designed for generating strong broadband field enhancement in its extended feed gap. The strongly enhanced RF field within the gap can be applied to directly modulate guided optical wave propagating in a waveguide, which enables to realize indirect RF signal sensing through photonic methods. Systematic exploration for modified bowtie antennas and its substrate effect has been given in this part. In the second part, the RF antenna design idea is extended to infrared and optical range based on antenna scaling theory specific for this spectrum. Both transmission and reflection types of metasurface structures have been designed and proposed to obtain optical needle field with a flat-top longitudinal intensity of depth of focus 5λ. With fine adjustment of different nano-antenna structures, both of the metasurfaces enable to generate complex vectorial field with spatial radial polarization, whose amplitude modulation range covers 0.07 to 1 with binary phase control. Then the scattered field can be tightly focused by a high numerical aperture (NA) lens in order to generate longitudinally polarized flat-top field along propagation direction. By exploring the subwavelength antennas' mechanism and connections between different frequency regions, this dissertation is expected to provide general guidance for design and characterization of next-generation subwavelength antennas structures with extraordinary electromagnetic wave properties.

Keywords

Electromagnetic fields Properties, Electromagnetic waves, Surface wave antennas Design and construction, Engineering, Experiments, Electromagnetics, Nanoscience, Nanotechnology, Optics, Subwavelength antennas, vectorial light, meta-surface, nano structures, full wave control, optical needle field

Rights Statement

Copyright © 2015, author

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