Early quasioptics of near-millimeter and submillimeter waves in IRE-Kharkov, Ukraine: From ideas to the microwave pioneer award

Yevgeny Mitrofanovich Kuleshov, 1922–2016 – His contribution to early sub-millimeter wave quasioptics

“…Worth noting is that the latter prize was awarded entirely for the development of the pioneering HDB technology [3]. Here, its application in Tokamaks of IAE was considered as the most impressive sign of its high usefulness and practicality.…”

“…However in the 1970s, such a customer appeared, and extremely wealthy one. This was the same department of hot plasma diagnostics in the Tokamak thermonuclear fusion machines at IAE in Moscow (see [3] for details), which was then building new machines with denser and hotter plasmas and thus was interested in even shorter electromagnetic waves for the diagnostics.…”

“…In the heart of all quasi-optical components was innovative idea of the hollow dielectric beam-waveguide (HDB) technology, first proposed in 1964 [3]. In 1972, after a long struggle with secrecy-overwhelmed USSR bureaucracy, it was patented by eight Kharkiv inventors, including Kuleshov.…”

“…In comparison with various other waveguides, the cross-sectional dimension of HDB was significantly larger as compared with the wavelength, and the dielectric lining had relatively large loss tangent (typically around 0.1) and sizable thickness. All this resulted in a specific “self-filtering effect”: the higher-order modes of HDB propagate with significant losses and only the principal HE_11 mode keeps low attenuation [3, 19, 20]. Quite interestingly, this effect was experimentally established by Kuleshov in the mid-1960; however, the full-wave modeling was done only recently in [24, 25] by the groups in the UK and Australia working with plastic THz waveguides similar to Kuleshov's HDB.…”

“…Besides of being a team member for the Lenin Prize in 1960, Kuleshov held the USSR titles of Honorary Inventor (1978), Honorary Radio Engineer (1980), and was awarded, as team leader, the State Prize of Ukraine (1972). Worth noting is that the latter prize was awarded entirely for the development of the pioneering HDB technology [3]. Here, its application in Tokamaks of IAE was considered as the most impressive sign of its high usefulness and practicality.…”