January 1990
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This report presents the progress made during the period of June 1985 to June 1988 on experimental and theoretical investigations of waveguiding structures utilizing surface waves on high quality semiconducting substrates. When exposed to a d.c. biasing magnetic field, these structures display nonreciprocal behavior which can be used to design nonreciprocal devices such as circulators, isolators, and phase shifters in the millimeter and submillimeter wave frequency ranges. Reasonable losses can be achieved for device purposes when operated at cryogenic temperatures. Various experimental techniques were explored to achieve surface plasmon excitation on n-type semiconducting materials in the near-millimeter wave ranges. Although some limited studies have been carried out on this topic in the optical frequency range, very little work is available on experimental derivation of propagation characteristics of surface plasmon on III-V semiconductor compounds. For our purposes, most of the theory was deduced from optics with numerous experiments conducted to obtain a reasonable interpretation for the quasi-optical theory applied to the millimeter wave range. The quasi-optical method employed both the prism coupling and grating coupling techniques to generate surface plasmon on highly doped semiconductor materials in the frequency range of 110-160 GHz. (rrh)