Planar metamaterials consisting of subwavelength resonators have been recently proposed for thin dielectric film sensing in the terahertz frequency range. Although the thickness of the dielectric film can be very small compared with the wavelength, the required area of sensed material is still determined by the diffraction-limited spot size of the terahertz beam excitation. In this article, terahertz near-field sensing is utilized to reduce the spot size. By positioning the metamaterial sensing platform close to the sub-diffraction terahertz source, the number of excited resonators, and hence minimal film area, are significantly reduced. As an additional advantage, a reduction in the number of excited resonators decreases the inter-cell coupling strength, and consequently the resonance Q factor is remarkably increased. The experimental results show that the resonance Q factor is improved by more than a factor of two compared to the far-field measurement. Moreover, for a film with a thickness of λ/375 the minimal area can be as small as 0.2λ × 0.2λ. The success of this work provides a platform for future metamaterial-based sensors for biomolecular detection.

Biosensing with terahertz (THz) waves has received large amounts of attention due to its potential to detect the functional expression of biomolecules in a label-free fashion. However, many practical challenges against the diffraction limit of THz waves and the strong absorption of THz waves into polar solvents still remain in the development of compact biosensors. Here, we present a non-linear, optical, crystal-based THz-microfluidic chip with a few arrays of asymmetric meta-atoms, an elementary unit of metamaterials, for the measurement of trace amounts of solution samples. A near-field THz emission source, that is locally generated in the process of optical rectification at a fs (femtosecond) laser irradiation spot, induces a sharp Fano resonance and modifies the resonance frequency of the meta-atoms when the channel is filled with solution samples of different concentrations. Using this chip, we successfully detected minute changes in the concentration of trace amounts of mineral water and aqueous sugar solutions by monitoring the shift in the resonance frequency. A higher detectable sensitivity of 1.4 fmol of solute in a 128 pL volume of solution was achieved. This was an improvement of one order of magnitude in the sensitivity compared to our previous experiment.

We present a nonlinear optical crystal (NLOC)-based terahertz (THz) microfluidic chip with a few arrays of split ring resonators (SRRs) for ultra-trace and quantitative measurements of liquid solutions. The proposed chip operates on the basis of near-field coupling between the SRRs and a local emission of point like THz source that is generated in the process of optical rectification in NLOCs on a sub-wavelength scale. The liquid solutions flowing inside the microchannel modify the resonance frequency and peak attenuation in the THz transmission spectra. In contrast to conventional bio-sensing with far/near-field THz waves, our technique can be expected to compactify the chip design as well as realize high sensitive near-field measurement of liquid solutions without any high-power optical/THz source, near-field probes, and prisms. Using this chip, we have succeeded in observing the 31.8 fmol of ion concentration in actual amount of 318 pl water solutions from the shift of the resonance frequency. The technique opens the door to microanalysis of biological samples with THz waves and accelerates development of THz lab-on-chip devices.

We have proposed and developed a scanning laser terahertz (THz) near-field imaging system using a 1.56 μm femtosecond fiber laser for high spatial resolution and high-speed measurement. To obtain the two-dimensional (2D) THz images of samples, the laser pulses are scanned over a 2D THz emitter plate [DASC: 4'-dimenthylamino-N-methyl-4- stilbazolium p-chlorobenzenesulfonate] by a galvano meter. In this system, THz wave pulses locally generated at the laser irradiation spots transmit through the sample set on the emitter, and the amplitude of the transmitted THz wave pulse is detected by using a typical THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) technique. Using this system, we have succeeded in obtaining THz transmission images of a triangle shaped metal sheet of millimeter-size and a human hair sample with a spatial resolution of sub-wavelength order up to ~27 μm (~λTHz/28) at an imaging speed of about 47 seconds/image for 512 x 512 pixels.

Excitons play major roles in optical processes in modern semiconductors, such as single-wall carbon nanotubes (CNTs), transition metal dichalcogenides, and 2D perovskite quantum wells. They possess extremely large binding energies (>100 meV), dominating absorption and emission spectra even at high temperatures. The large binding energies imply that they are stable, that is, hard to ionize, rendering them seemingly unsuited for optoelectronic devices that require mobile charge carriers, especially terahertz emitters and solar cells. Here, we have conducted terahertz emission and photocurrent studies on films of aligned single-chirality semiconducting CNTs and find that excitons autoionize, i.e., spontaneously dissociate into electrons and holes. This process naturally occurs ultrafast (<1 ps) while conserving energy and momentum. The created carriers can then be accelerated to emit a burst of terahertz radiation when a dc bias is applied, with promising efficiency in comparison to standard GaAs-based emitters. Furthermore, at high bias, the accelerated carriers acquire high enough kinetic energy to create secondary excitons through impact exciton generation, again in a fully energy and momentum conserving fashion. This exciton multiplication process leads to a nonlinear photocurrent increase as a function of bias. Our theoretical simulations based on nonequilibrium Boltzmann transport equations, taking into account all possible scattering pathways and a realistic band structure, reproduce all of our experimental data semiquantitatively. These results not only elucidate the momentum-dependent ultrafast dynamics of excitons and carriers in CNTs but also suggest promising routes toward terahertz excitonics despite the orders-of-magnitude mismatch between the exciton binding energies and the terahertz photon energies.