Experimental evidence of backward waves on terahertz left-handed transmission lines

Abstract

Left-handed transmission lines have been characterized by electro-optic sampling. The transmission lines used a coplanar strip technology periodically loaded by series capacitances and shunt inductances printed by electron-beam lithography onto a low-κ substrate. The experiments by optoelectronic sampling were conducted using low-temperature-grown GaAs and AlGaAs patches for probing the time-domain transmission properties. The devices exhibit a high-frequency response above 100 and up to 400 GHz which shows direct evidence of a backward propagation by tracking the time dependence of transmitted signals and phase analysis.