Spintronic terahertz (THz) emitter provides the advantages such as apparently broader spectrum, significantly lower cost, and more flexibility compared with the commercial THz emitters, and thus attracts great interest recently. In past few years, efforts have been made in optimizing the material composition and structure geometry, and the conversion efficiency has been improved close to that of ZnTe crystal. One of the drawbacks of the current designs is the rather limited laser absorption—more than 50% energy is wasted and the conversion efficiency is thus limited. Here, a novel device that fully utilizes the laser intensity and significantly improves the conversion efficiency is theoretically proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The device, which consists of a metal–dielectric photonic crystal structure, utilizes the interference between the multiple scattering waves to simultaneously suppress the reflection and transmission of the laser, and to reshape the laser field distributions. The experimentally detected laser absorption and THz generation show one‐to‐one correspondence with the theoretical calculations. The strongest THz pulse emission that presents a 1.7 times improvement compared to the currently designed spintronic emitter is achieved. This work opens a new pathway to improve the performance of spintronic THz emitter from the perspective of optics.
An effective and novel design strategy for ultrafast laser-initiating materials has been established on the basis of coordination chemistry for the first time in the present work. In view of the positive effect of Ag ion and perchlorate on laser sensitivity, silver perchlorate as a representative of oxidizing inorganic metal salts was used to construct energetic cationic coordination polymers (ECCPs), which solved the inconvenient situation caused by the difficulty in applying these salts directly in energetic materials because of the unavoidable hygroscopicity and the inhomogeneity of physical mixtures of oxidants and reductants. With the nonenergetic nitrogen-rich ligand 3-amino-1H-1,2,4-triazole-5-carbohydrazide (ATCA), one new laser-sensitive Ag(I)-based ECCP [Ag(ATCA)ClO 4 ] n (1) was successfully synthesized with a compact helical structure proved by X-ray single-diffraction crystal data. The physicochemical property evaluation revealed that this Ag-ECCP was not only completely devoid of the undesirable properties of the silver perchlorate and displayed excellent tolerance to moisture and noncorrosive properties to metal shells, but was also endowed with good thermal stability and excellent safety for mechanical stimulation. Moreover, theoretical calculations based on the standard molar enthalpy of formation and the lead plate explosive test as the actual damage experiment have proved that the compound has a superior detonation performance (up to 6800 m s −1 and 0.511 kcal g −1 ) compared to the traditional primary explosives. More importantly, the laser-initiation-experiment-based femtosecond laser-testing system and high-speed photography demonstrated that this ECCP was an energetic material with great potential for application in the safety detonator as an ultrafast photosensitive initiating material for laser direct initiation, whose initiation delay time is as low as 73 ms using only 200 mJ initiation energy.
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