Design and Experiment of 1 THz Slow Wave Structure Fabricated by Nano-CNC Technology

Abstract

This article reports a slow-wave structure (SWS) working at 1 THz which can be fabricated through nano-computer numerical control (nano-CNC) technology for the first time. First, a 1 THz deformed quasi sine waveguide (D-QSWG) SWS has been designed and simulated in this article. To reduce the metal loss of input and output waveguide, a coupler which transit the waveguide to over mode rectangular waveguide has been designed. The simulation result shows that input and output waveguides with this coupler have lower metal loss than that of WR1 rectangular waveguide. To fabricate the designed D-QSWG SWS, tungsten steel endmills have been used. The fabricated SWS has the surface roughness around 58&#x2013;74 nm, the corresponding effective conductivity is around <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2\times 10^{{7}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>&#x2013;1.85 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times 10^{{7}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> S/m. And the cold test results show that the insertion loss of the fabricated model is less than 30 dB while the reflection loss is less than &#x2212;15 dB in the frequency range of 0.998&#x2013;1.016 THz, which has a good consistency with the simulated results. The beam-wave interaction simulation results based on the cold test results show that the designed D-QSWG traveling wave tube (TWT) has the output power of 300 mW, and the 3 dB bandwidth is around 3 GHz.