Terahertz (THz) waves show great potential in nondestructive testing, biodetection and cancer imaging. Despite recent progress in THz wave near-field probes/apertures enabling raster scanning of an object's surface, an efficient, nonscanning, noninvasive, deep subdiffraction imaging technique remains challenging. Here, we demonstrate THz near-field microscopy using a reconfigurable spintronic THz emitter array (STEA) based on the computational ghost imaging principle. By illuminating an object with the reconfigurable STEA followed by computing the correlation, we can reconstruct an image of the object with deep subdiffraction resolution. By applying an external magnetic field, inline polarization rotation of the THz wave is realized, making the fused image contrast polarization-free. Time-of-flight (TOF) measurements of coherent THz pulses further enable objects at different distances or depths to be resolved. The demonstrated ghost spintronic THz-emitter-array microscope (GHOSTEAM) is a radically novel imaging tool for THz near-field imaging, opening paradigm-shifting opportunities for nonintrusive label-free bioimaging in a broadband frequency range from 0.1 to 30 THz (namely, 3.3-1000 cm −1).
We present a terahertz (THz) amplitude modulation method with near perfect E-field amplitude modulation depths that is based on impedance matching in VO2 thin films during the thermally induced insulator-metal transition (IMT). It was observed that the impedance matching-induced THz amplitude modulation was sensitive to the resistance switching characteristics of the VO2 thin films. By designing the VO2 thin films to have four orders of magnitude of change in resistance during the IMT, we experimentally achieved an E-field amplitude modulation depth of 94.5% (intensity modulation depth of 99.7%) between the insulator phase of VO2 and the impedance matching state, and an E-field amplitude modulation depth of 97.6% (intensity modulation depth of 99.94%) between the impedance matching state and the metallic phase of VO2 at 0.5 THz. The experimental results were consistent with the results of simulations based on the transmission matrix model.
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