Experimental demonstration of ultra-wideband and high-efficiency terahertz spoof surface plasmon polaritons coupler

摘要

Spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SSPPs) are promising for subwavelength waveguiding in the terahertz (THz) frequency range. However, they cannot be efficiently excited from spatial propagating or guided waves due to the mismatched momenta. In this paper, a THz coupler is designed to smoothly bridge SSPPs and guided (or propagating) waves. By using a tapered parallel-plate waveguide, the incident energies are efficiently compressed and coupled into a subwavelength gap. Then, the momenta differences are mitigated with a graded grating. The numerical simulations show that the relative bandwidth of the coupler reaches up to 127%, and the maximum coupling efficiency is 99%. More importantly, experiment results in the 0.22 THz-0.33 THz frequency range are also presented to verify the good performance of the coupler. The work provides a technical support for terahertz waveguiding.