Fabrication and Characterization of Plasmonic Thin-Film Terahertz Photoconductive Antenna

This work presents the fabrication and experimental characterization of a plasmonic thin-film terahertz photoconductive antenna. The fabricated plasmonic thin-film devices were characterized in a time-domain spectrometer setup. The devices demonstrated a 10 3 times increase in the average power when compared to a conventional device, as well as over 4 THz usable bandwidth. This increase in performance was due to the combination of plasmonic nanostructures and a thin-film optically resonant photoconductive layer. These features effectively trap the optical laser beam used to drive the antenna in a region of the photoconductor nearest to the antenna electrodes, increasing collection efficiency of the photocarriers and output THz power of the antenna.