Extraordinary broadband impedance matching in highly dispersive media - the white light cavity approach

Jacob Scheuer*, Dmitry Filonov, Tatyana Vosheva, Pavel Ginzburg

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Suppressing reflections from material boundaries has always been an objective, common to many disciplines, where wave phenomena play a role. While impedance difference between materials necessarily leads to a wave reflection, introducing matching elements can almost completely suppress this phenomenon. However, many impedance matching approaches are based on resonant conditions, which come at a price of narrow bandwidth operation. Although various impedance matching architectures have been developed in the past, many of them fail to produce a broadband and flat (ripple-free) transmission, particularly in the presence of strong chromatic dispersion. Here we propose and demonstrate an approach for designing an optimal matching stack capable of providing a flat broadband transmission even in the presence of significant group velocity dispersion. As an experimental example for the method verification, we used a strong modal dispersion in a rectangular waveguide, operating close to a mode cut-off. The waveguide core consists of alternating polymer sections with a variable filling factor, realized using additive manufacturing. As a result, a broadband matching in the range of 7-8GHz was demonstrated and proved to significantly outperform the standard binomial transformer solution. The proposed method can find use across different disciplines, including optics, acoustics and wireless communications, where undesired reflections can significantly degrade system's performances.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)5192-5199
Number of pages8
JournalOptics Express
Volume30
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 14 Feb 2022

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Extraordinary broadband impedance matching in highly dispersive media - the white light cavity approach'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this