Executive Summary : | The increasing demand for fast, secure, and large data transmission rates in advanced applications like IoT, AI, wearable devices, automotives, and smart cities has led to the need to upgrade existing wireless communication systems. However, the limited available space, particularly in mobile, wearable, and handheld devices, is a major challenge in improving performance. Antennas are essential for electromagnetic wave transmission and reception, and their compact size and high efficiency are in high demand. Antennas typically have emission/radiation efficiencies bounded by A/(lambda)², making it challenging to miniaturize antennas to extreme sub-wavelength dimensions without severely compromising their efficiencies. Compact antennas rely on an EM wave resonance, typically having a size of more than (lambda)/10, which is one-tenth of the EM wavelength. This limitation has made it necessary to investigate new antenna concepts with new mechanisms for the reduction of antenna size.
This proposal aims to develop ultra-compact magnetoelectric nano-antennas that address these challenges strategically. The proposed antenna can be implemented with a large array of magnetostrictive nanomagnets whose magnetizations oscillate when subjected to a surface acoustic wave (SAW). The SAW periodically strains the nanomagnets, making their magnetic moments oscillate in time and emitting EM waves. The advantages of the proposed antenna include exceeding the radiation limit by a larger factor, radiating at any arbitrary frequency, and having an emitting area more than eight orders of magnitude smaller than the square of the wavelength, resulting in drastic miniaturization. |