Driven by the miniaturization of integrated electronics and the increasing demand for ultrafast information transmission in communication systems, investigations into functional devices based on spoof surface plasmonic polaritons (SPPs) have garnered significant attention. However, the characteristics of spoof SPPs are related to geometric parameters of the unit structure, the functions of devices that composed by unit structures cannot be altered by changing the sizes of structures. The next focus to be investigated is the reconfigurable and active control of the device. Herein, we report a reconfigurable and direction-controllable coupler for spoof SPPs to spatial radiated waves. By changing the rotation angles of unit cells, it becomes possible to independently control the reflection phases. Through manipulation of different phase gradients, various reflection angles can be achieved at a fixed frequency. The results confirm that the proposed coupler holds great promise for applications in reconfigurable functional devices.
In the terahertz regime, due to perfect conductivity of most metals, it is hard to realize a strong confinement of Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) although a propagation loss could be sufficiently low. We experimentally demonstrated a structure with periodic pillars arranged on a thin metal surface that supports bound modes of spoof SPPs at terahertz (THz) frequencies. By using scanning near-field THz microscopy, the electric field distribution above the metal surface within a distance of 130 μm was mapped. The results proved that this structure could guide spoof SPPs propagating along subwavelength waveguides, and at the same time reduce field expansion into free space. Further, for the development of integrated optical circuits, several components including straight waveguide, S-bend, Y-splitter and directional couplers were designed and characterized by the same method. We believe that the waveguide components proposed here will pave a new way for the development of flexible, wideband and compact photonic circuits operating at THz frequencies.
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