Ranging and Acuity Enhancement for Terahertz Imaging Spectrometers

The company proposes to build antennas, circuits and modulation techniques for a unique, patent-pending approach to encoding a stream of pulses from a broadband coherent terahertz or submillimeter-wave spectrometer. This technique relies on broadband antennas with specific pulse-radiating capabilities. The essence of the approach is to drive two co-axial ultrawideband antennas with modulated pulse streams. This Phase II effort will produce antennas used to mitigate standing-wave effects for pulsed sub-millimeter-wave and terahertz imaging spectrometers independent of their technology (e.g. electronic mm-wave vector network analyzers vs. optically-based fast-pulse time-domain systems). A close collaboration with Prof. Susan Hagness, who is an expert in computational electromagnetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, ensured that the antenna designs we propose are both simulated and optimized computationally to reduce effort in fabrication and testing. This Phase I effort established the initial antenna designs, plans and preliminary measurements required to substantiate a demonstration plan in the future and to make predictions for range and acuity enhancements, while the Phase II effort will result in a prototype system capable of mitigating standing wave effects in THz-frequency spectral imaging applications of interest to the U.S. Army and DoD.