Document VersionPublisher's PDF, also known as Version of Record (includes final page, issue and volume numbers) Please check the document version of this publication:• A submitted manuscript is the author's version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website.• The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review.• The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. We have built a relatively simple, highly efficient, THz emission and detection system centered around a 15 fs Ti:sapphire laser. In the system, 200 mW of laser power is focused to a 120 m diam spot between two silverpaint electrodes on the surface of a semi-insulating GaAs crystal, kept at a temperature near 300 K, biased with a 50 kHz, Ϯ400 V square wave. Using rapid delay scanning and lock-in detection at 50 kHz, we obtain probe laser quantum-noise limited signals using a standard electro-optic detection scheme with a 1-mm-thick ͑110͒ oriented ZnTe crystal or a ͑110͒ oriented 0.1-mm-thick GaP crystal. The maximum THz-induced differential signal that we observe is ⌬I/Iϭ7ϫ10Ϫ3 , corresponding to a THz peak amplitude of 95 V/cm. The THz average power was measured to be about 40 W, to our knowledge, the highest power reported so far generated with Ti:sapphire oscillators as a pump source. The system uses off-the-shelf electronics and requires no microfabrication techniques.

We have performed terahertz time-domain spectroscopy measurements on three types of polystyrene foam. We find that between 0.2 and 4 THz, the extinction of this material is low and that it has a remarkably low refractive index of 1.017 to 1.022 in this range, with little variation as a function of frequency. In foam produced with HCFC 142b gas (1-chloro-1,1-difluoroethane) as the blowing agent, we find an additional absorption band at 0.5 THz caused by rotational transitions in this gas. The low extinction and refractive index make polystyrene foam a very suitable material to be used as a dichroic filter that blocks the near-IR and transmits THz radiation with small losses of less than 1.5 cm Ϫ1 for frequencies of Ͻ4 THz, and as a substrate for THz imaging.

In this paper, we report a transmissive terahertz (THz) metalens based on a dielectric metasurface that consists of periodically arranged sub-wavelength silicon cross resonators with a spatially hyperboloidal phase profile. By varying arm lengths of the cross resonators, we obtained a full 2π phase coverage with high transmission at target frequency. The fabricated metalens was experimentally demonstrated to focus a continuous THz beam to a spot with a full width at half-maximum of 630 μm at a focal length of 28 mm, which agrees well with the theoretical calculation. This device has potential for applications in THz imaging and communications, and our work can also easily be extended in the design of other planar THz components, such as beam deflectors or vortex plates.

A terahertz (THz) spectroscopic study is carried out to analyze DNA mutations in a label-free manner. Three newly designed liquid sample cells are considered and the best is selected as the sample carrier for THz transmission spectroscopic analyses. Discrimination based on spectral signatures of single-base mutations on single-stranded 20 nt oligonucleotides has been shown possible experimentally. The results clearly attest the ability of this promising approach for label-free analyses of single-base mutations of DNA molecules. This study has demonstrated that the THz spectroscopic technology can be considered as a potential diagnostic tool for investigating molecular reactions, such as DNA mutations.

Single-crystal structures of five lanthanide–erythritol complexes are reported. The analysis of the chemical compositions and scrutinization of structural features in the single-crystal data of the complexes led us to find that unexpected deprotonation occurs on the OH group of erythritol of three complexes. Considering these complexes were prepared in acidic environments, where spontaneous ionization on an OH group is suppressed, we suggest metal ions play an important role in promoting the proton transfer. To find out why the chemically inert OH is activated, the single-crystal structures of 63 rare-earth complexes containing organic ligands with multiple hydroxyl groups (OLMHs) were surveyed. The formation of μ2-bridges turns out to be directly relevant to the occurrence of deprotonation. When an OH group from an OLMH molecule participates in the formation of a μ2-bridge, the polarization ability of the metal ions becomes strong enough to promote the deprotonation on the OH group. The above structural characteristics may be useful in the rational design of catalysts that can activate the chemically inert OH group and promote the relevant chemical conversions.