Efficiently converting incident free-space light into surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs)
and improving the integration of on-chip plasmonic devices in the
terahertz regime remain great challenges. Here, a single ultra-compact
device is proposed to efficiently couple propagating waves into
on-chip terahertz plasmonic waveguides. We first design a
high-efficiency meta-coupler composed of isotropic meta-atoms with an
absolute excitation efficiency of 82%. This scheme is further extended
using anisotropic meta-atoms to realize another meta-coupler that can
efficiently couple orthogonal linearly polarized light into SPPs
propagating in orthogonal directions. Next, we use the same
anisotropic meta-atoms to efficiently convert free-space light into an
SPP beam and then focus the beam to a spot (with a focusing efficiency
of approximately 59%), which is then fed into a subwavelength on-chip
plasmonic waveguide with an absolute working efficiency of 53%.
Finally, a meta-coupler is constructed that can achieve
polarization-controlled unidirectional SPP excitation with a focused
wavefront in different directions and squeeze the focused SPPs into a
dual-waveguide system. Our design scheme that can efficiently couple
propagating light into SPPs has potential applications in on-chip
devices in the terahertz regime.