New insights from broadband simulations into small overmoded smooth and corrugated terahertz waveguides and transitions for NMR-DNP

The primary impetus for the work reported in this paper is to develop efficient overmoded waveguides (OMWGs) that employ broadband downtaper transitions that would be compatible with the severe space constraints in high-field NB magnets. Further, it is essential these would be readily manufacturable, as high precision corrugated metallic downtapers for the sub-mmw regime are very difficult to produce. We have simulated numerous alternatives to corrugated circular OMWGs, including most of the previously reported alternatives (except for many of the low-power fiberoptics options) and several novel designs. We conclude that corrugated circular metallic OMWGs are the best of the reported options to date (except from a cost perspective) for diameters down to ~1.5λ, but the corrugation parameters for small OMWGs need to be significantly different from the previously published guidelines that have worked well for large OMWGs. With numerically optimized small OMWGs, easily manufacturable smooth downtapers appear to work as well as corrugated downtapers in many cases relevant to MAS-DNP probes. Our example simulations will be for the 170–230 GHz range, but the lessons and results should be readily applicable to other ranges by simple scaling.