A Palm Tree Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna With Exponential Slot Edge for Improved Radiation Pattern

This letter presents an Exponential Slot Edge Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna (ESE-AVA), with improved radiative features as compared to the conventional Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna (AVA) design. It extends the low-end bandwidth limitation, mitigates the side and back lobe levels, corrects squint effect, and increases its main lobe gain. In order to confirm those features, a comparative study among the ESE-AVA, the low directivity conventional AVA and two popular modifications, regular slot edge (RSE) and the tapered slot edge (TSE) AVA is performed. A comparison between AVA and the proposed ESE-AVA at 6 GHz shows an improved gain of 8.3 dB, -15.5 dB of Side Lobe Level (SLL), and 0 degrees of main lobe squint (MLS), in contrast with 5 dB of gain, - 5 dB of SLL, and 5 degrees of MLS in the conventional AVA. By comparing the ESE-AVA with RSE-AVA and TSE-AVA, it was observed that its notches in exponential shape, similar to open the main radiator, besides mitigating the SLL also directs the E-fields distributions towards the main lobe. It reflects into a main lobe gain improvement.