Terahertz waves, electromagnetic radiation in the spectral region commonly defined between 0.3 and 10THz, allow innovative sensing and imaging techniques that can provide spectroscopic information unavailable at other wavelengths. However, simultaneously intense, broadband, and coherent spectroscopic measurement remains challenging. We report spectrometry using gases ionized by femtosecond pulses to generate and sense broadband terahertz pulses. Using a coherent heterodyne technique, the measurements span the “terahertz gap” with ⩾10% of the maximum signal from 0.3to10THz. This spectrometer, using a recycled optical probe beam and coherent detection, offers a high field strength and time-resolved measurement.
We report the use of a compact continuous-wave sub-terahertz system for inspection applications, using electronic generation and detection methods. A combination of a Gunn diode emitter, a Schottky diode detector, and a polyethylene Fresnel lens provides line-scan images at 0.2 m / s with a data acquisition rate of 512 points/ s. Examples of the measurement of NASA's insulating panels and applicability of the technology to other nondestructive testing applications are presented and discussed.
Integrating multiple functionalities into a single device is a striking field in metasurfaces. One promising aspect is polarization-dependent meta-devices enabled by simultaneous phase control for orthogonally polarized waves. Among these, Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) metasurfaces have drawn enormous interest owing to their natural and robust phase control ability over different circularly polarized waves. However, the phase responses are locked to be opposite with each other, resulting in interrelated functionalities under the circularly polarized incidence. Here, a generic designing method based on transmission-type dielectric metasurfaces is proposed in the terahertz regime, which breaks this relation by further incorporating dynamic phase with geometric phase, namely, spin-decoupled phase control method. We demonstrate this method by designing and characterizing an efficient multifunctional meta-grating, which splits different circularly polarized waves to asymmetric angles under normal incidences. More importantly, we promote this method by designing several multiplexed meta-gratings for applications of asymmetric polarization generation, which can convert arbitrary linearly polarized wave to two different linearly polarized waves with nearly equal strength and split them to asymmetric angles with a polarization-insensitive efficiency. The designing strategy proposed here shows an impressive robustness and a great flexibility for designing multifunctional metasurface-based devices and opens new avenues toward modulation of polarization states and the application of metasurfaces in beam steering and polarization multiplexing systems.
We demonstrated an advanced terahertz imaging technique for detection and identification of illicit drugs by introducing the component spatial pattern analysis. As an explanation, the characteristic fingerprint spectra and refractive index of ketamine were first measured with terahertz time-domain spectroscopy both in the air and nitrogen. The results obtained in the ambient air indicated that some absorption peaks are not obvious or probably not dependable. It is necessary and important to present a more practical technique for the detection. The spatial distributions of several illicit drugs [3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, methylenedioxyamphetamine, heroin, acetylcodeine, morphine, and ketamine], widely consumed in the world, were obtained from terahertz images using absorption spectra previously measured in the range from 0.2to2.6THz in the ambient air. The different kinds of pure illicit drugs hidden in mail envelopes were inspected and identified. It could be an effective method in the field of safety inspection.
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