New THZ excitation of planar Goubau line

Quite recently, it has been found that conducting wires lying on a flat dielectric substrate can propagate Terahertz (THz) waves in the same way as conducting wires entirely coated with a dielectric (Goubau line). This phenomenon is interesting because it is a basic requirement to fabricate integrated circuits at THz frequencies. The excitation of planar Goubau line (PGL) waves was found to have a very strong Goubau mode on conducting wire. The excitation was made with a coplanar waveguide transition fed with a THz signal obtained from a vector network analyzer. The Goubau mode on PGL was excited with high efficiency (up to 75%.). This is a first step in the design of THz BioMEMS dedicated to living cell investigations.