Wide band prototype feedhorn design for ASTE focal plane array

KASI and NAOJ are making collaborating efforts to implement faster mapping capability into the new 275-500 GHz Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment focal plane array (FPA). Feed horn antenna is one of critical parts of the FPA. Required fractional bandwidth is almost 60 % while that of traditional conical horn is less than 50 %. Therefore, to achieve this wideband performance, we adopted a horn of which the corrugation depths have a longitudinal profile. A profiled horn has features not only of wide bandwidth but also of shorter length compared to a linear-tapered corrugated horn, and lower cost fabrication with less error can be feasible. In our design process the flare region is represented by a cubic splined curve with several parameters. Parameters of the flare region and each dimension of the throat region are optimized by a differential evolution algorithm to keep >20 dB return loss and >30 dB maximum cross-polarization level over the operation bandwidth. To evaluate RF performance of the horn generated by the optimizer, we used a commercial mode matching software, WASP-NET. Also, Gaussian beam (GB) masks to far fields were applied to give better GB behavior over frequencies. The optimized design shows >23 dB return loss and >33 dB maximum cross-polarization level over the whole band. Gaussicity of the horn is over 96.6 %. The length of the horn is 12.5 mm which is just 57 % of the ALMA band 8 feed horn (21.96 mm).