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Comment by sydthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to make an antenna that radiates teraherrz radiation?

Yes. We do it all the time. In some sense, the tricky part is not the antenna itself. It's the electronics that you use to drive it. Electronics can be fast enough to drive an antenna at a few GHz, which is why it is easy to generate microwaves: just hook up some fast electronics to a microwave antenna. But there are few (if any) electronics fast enough to drive an antenna at these high frequencies (like 1 THz).

Will it look like a beam of light?

Not to us, and that's the interesting bit in this EM range.

It will be more light like than microwaves are, but less light like than light is.

And what we can learn from using that range is still new ground because it's hard to make devices that emit RF in those ranges.

Your eyes cannot see THz radiation, so no. It's invisible to the human eye. Like microwaves.

But yes, it is possible to produce a beam.

Also: to be fair, the challenge in finding efficient sources is really only one of the challenges. Not even the biggest one.

There are many 80GHz +/- systems for short haul backbone links started at 1Gbps and these were marketed as wireless fiber for building to building intercity type connections. They have a "pencil" shaped beam and suffer from rain fade / sand storms / etc but are used in the field for special cases.

Heres a quick example: [1] http://www.aowireless.com/about-us/wireless-partners/wireles...

Sure, why not? THz wavelengths are between 3 mm and 30 μm which is not very large for an antenna but not anywhere near the limit of what we can make these days.

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