Field analysis for a highly overmoded iris line with application to THz radiation transport

Abstract

Vector field analysis is presented for a highly overmoded iris-line structure that can act as a medium of transportation for THz radiation. The axisymmetric structure is capable of supporting hybrid modes with desirable features such as low propagation loss, uniformly linear polarization and approximately Gaussian intensity profile across the iris. A specific application that can benefit from these desirable features is the transportation of THz undulator radiation over hundreds of meters to reach the experimental halls at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) facility at SLAC, Stanford. Such a structure has been modeled before as a boundary-value problem using Vainstein’s complex-impedance boundary condition and assuming infinitely thin screens. Given that physical realizations of such screens must have finite thickness and that the THz wavelength in the 3–15 THz range is expected to be smaller than convenient screen thicknesses in practice, the question of the impact of finite screen thickness on propagation performance becomes rather pressing. To address this question, we present a mode-matching analysis of the structure as an open resonator with finite screen thickness and perturbatively clustered (localized) field expansions, for computational feasibility. The effect of screen thickness is seen to lower the attenuation constant on the iris line, which is dominated by diffraction loss. Ohmic loss due to the finite conductivity of metallic surfaces at the screen edges is found to be small compared to diffraction loss. The propagation loss predictions based on the Vainstein model are compared with the numerical results from mode matching for infinitely thin screens, where the former method is observed to agree with the numerical results better at higher Fresnel numbers (highly overmoded structures). The properties of the dominant mode fields are formally derived from first principles and a recommended approach is discussed for the inclusion of screen-thickness effects into propagation loss estimations.