Terahertz (THz) radiation has important applications in spectroscopy, imaging, and space science. For some of these applications, in particular spectroscopy, a flexible fiber optic could potentially simplify the THz system and enable the user to transmit radiation to remote locations without excessive absorption by atmospheric moisture. To date THz fiber optics and waveguides have been limited to rigid hollow metallic waveguides, solid wires, or short lengths of solid-core transparent dielectrics such as sapphire and plastic. In this paper we report on flexible, hollow polycarbonate waveguides with interior Cu coatings for broadband THz transmission fabricated using simple liquid-phase chemistry techniques. The losses for these hollow-core guides were measured using a tunable, cw single-mode far IR laser. The losses for the best guides were found to be less than four dB/m and the single mode of the laser was preserved for the smaller bore waveguides. Loss calculations of the loss for the HE11 mode reveal that the metal-coated hollow waveguides have much higher loss than for waveguides coated with both metallic and dielectric thin films.
This paper describes a new method for carrying increased information in an optical network via imparting that information onto a THz frequency carrier and then "up-shifting" the resulting THz signal into a frequency band where: long-range transmission is facilitated, and there are a wide array of existing components which can be applied. The architecture described here takes the approach of carrier suppression as a method of improving extinction ratio. These authors believe that this general architecture has not been applied in the optical communications field in the past. The focus of this paper will be to describe the proposed approach and to provide estimates of the required performance of each major element of the system. For each element the required performance will be compared with published results to show that the majority of the basic technology to prove-out this approach exists today. While the description which follows is focused on a long-range fiber transmission system, the same approach could also be applied to ultra-high-data-rate local networking as well.
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