Overview of new antenna technologies for the Square Kilometre Array

Performance of a radio telescope mainly depends on the front-end, especially the antennas. During the past decades, characteristics of the antennas are greatly improved, such as effective receiving area, frequency bandwidth, and field-of-view etc, which enables new scientific discoveries. This paper presents an overview of the emerging technologies of antennas for the next-generation radio telescopes, including the single-piece reflector panel, phased array feed, ultra-wideband single pixel feed, and aperture array. As part of the worldwide efforts toward the Square Kilometre Array(SKA), these technologies are actively prompted and breakthroughs have been made, which may also provide experiences for other antennas.