Graphene-based nano-antennas for electromagnetic nanocommunications in the terahertz band

Nanotechnology is enabling the development of devices in a scale ranging from one to a few hundred nanometers. Coordination and information sharing among these nano-devices will lead towards the development of future nanonetworks, boosting the range of applications of nanotechnology in the biomédical, environmental and military fields. Despite the major progress in nano-device design and fabrication, it is still not clear how these atomically precise machines will communicate. Recently, the advancements in graphene-based electronics have opened the door to electromagnetic communications in the nano-scale. In this paper, a new quantum mechanical framework is used to analyze the properties of Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) as nano-dipole antennas. For this, first the transmission line properties of CNTs are obtained using the tight-binding model as functions of the CNT length, diameter, and edge geometry. Then, relevant antenna parameters such as the fundamental resonant frequency and the input impedance are calculated and compared to those of a nano-patch antenna based on a Graphene Nanoribbon (GNR) with similar dimensions. The results show that for a maximum antenna size in the order of several hundred nanometers (the expected maximum size for a nano-device), both a nano-dipole and a nano-patch antenna will be able to radiate electromagnetic waves in the terahertz band (0.1–10.0 THz).