Terahertz laser frequency combs

By D. Burghoff, T. Kao, Ningren Han, Chun Wang Ivan Chan, Xiaowei Cai, Yang Yang, D. Hayton, Jianxun Gao, J. Reno, Q. Hu. Nature Photonics, 2014

487 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Terahertz light can be used to identify numerous complex molecules, but has traditionally remained unexploited due to the lack of powerful broadband sources. Pulsed lasers can be used to generate broadband radiation, but such sources are bulky and produce only microwatts of average power. Conversely, although terahertz quantum cascade lasers are compact semiconductor sources of high-power terahertz radiation, their narrowband emission makes them unsuitable for complex spectroscopy. In this work, we demonstrate frequency combs based on terahertz quantum cascade lasers, which combine the high power of lasers with the broadband capabilities of pulsed sources. By fully exploiting the quantum-mechanically broadened gain spectrum available to these lasers, we can generate 5 mW of terahertz power spread across 70 laser lines. This radiation is sufficiently powerful to be detected by Schottky-diode mixers, and will lead to compact terahertz spectrometers. Frequency combs based on terahertz quantum cascade lasers, which combine the high power of lasers with the broadband capabilities of pulsed sources, are demonstrated. The frequency combs generate 5 mW of terahertz power covering a frequency range of almost 500 GHz and produce more than 70 lines at 3.5 THz.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e76cc15f5529be5a6c4e88c32e7491e8d9897927

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Citations in the corpus

The 2023 terahertz science and technology roadmap (2023, methodology): “This has led to room-temperature THz operation using intra-cavity difference-frequency mixing in MIR QCLs [132], FCs through four-wave mixing [126], nonlinear detectors [133], as well as recent demonstrations of high-order wave mixing in QCLs [134] and intersubband Figure 12.”
New frontiers in quantum cascade lasers: high performance room temperature terahertz sources (2015, background): “Furthermore, THz QCLs show high promise as broadband THz frequency comb sources [24, 25].”