Abstract
Spoof surface plasmon polariton waveguides are perfect candidates to enable novel, miniaturized terahertz integrated systems, which will expedite the next-generation ultra-wideband communications, high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy applications. In this paper, we introduce, for the first time, a model for the effective dielectric constant, which is the most fundamental design parameter, of the terahertz spoof surface plasmon polariton waveguides. To verify the proposed model, we design, fabricate and measure several waveguides with different physical parameters for 0.25 to 0.3 THz band. The measurement results show very good agreement with the simulations, having an average and a maximum error of 2.6% and 8.8%, respectively, achieving 10-to-30 times better accuracy than the previous approaches presented in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first-time investigation of the effective dielectric constant of the terahertz spoof surface plasmon polariton waveguides, enabling accurate design of any passive component for the terahertz band.
Highlights
Surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) are surface waves that propagate at the interface between dielectrics and metals at the optical frequency band, where the metals show complex and frequency dependent material characteristics, rather than behaving similar to perfect-electric-conductors (PEC)[1]
We verify the performance of the proposed model with the measurement results of several spoof surface plasmon polaritons (sSPP) WGs at the terahertz band, which are presented for the first time and show very good agreement with the simulations
Εeff is the effective dielectric constant, ∆ 0 is the phase difference between the delay lines (DLs) and reference line. ko is the free-space wavenumber at the frequency of operation and LsSPP is the physical length difference between DLs and the reference line
Summary
Surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) are surface waves that propagate at the interface between dielectrics and metals at the optical frequency band, where the metals show complex and frequency dependent material characteristics, rather than behaving similar to perfect-electric-conductors (PEC)[1]. Several groups proposed printed circuit board-based proof of concept designs and sensing applications These studies include TEM-mode to sSPP-mode transitions[13], investigation of the sSPP WGs and sSPP filters[14,15,16,17,18,19,20], metasurfaces[21], couplers[22,23], power dividers[24], antennas[25,26,27,28], switches[29], mode splitters[30] and sensors[31,32,33]. An effective dielectric constant model for the sSPP WGs is introduced for the microwave band[38] This solution is examined only at a single frequency, 6 GHz, for a limited set of physical parameters; the www.nature.com/scientificreports/. Our model enables much more accurate design of the sSPP WGs, which is one of the most critical components for high performance integrated systems for terahertz imaging, sensing and communication applications
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