Propagation Characteristics of Obliquely Incident Terahertz Waves in High-Temperature Magnetized Plasma

Abstract

Propagation characteristics of obliquely incident terahertz waves in high-temperature magnetized plasma are studied by the scattering matrix method (SMM) and Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin (WKB) method. Three cases of electron density distribution (uniform, double exponential, and Epstein distributions) are considered. Numerical simulation exhibits that the SMM can give out the nearly same results with the WKB method, which indicates that these two methods work very well for solving this problem. Through the analysis of the incident angle, we found that as the incident angle increases, it is not conducive to the transmission of left-handed circularly polarized (LCP) waves and right-handed circularly polarized (RCP) waves. When the incident angle increases to a certain value, the phenomenon of “total reflection” will appear. We also systematically calculated the influence of physical parameters such as electron density, collision frequency, plasma thickness, magnetic field strength, and electron temperature on the transmission characteristics. These theoretical results are helpful to alleviate “blackout” problem and improve communication quality.