Grant: Engage Grants Program

The terahertz (THz) ""gap"" (0.1-10 THz), often referred to as the last frontier of the electromagnetic spectrum, isseeing significant technological maturation at the present time. Applications are seeing exponential growth,driving a demand to develop efficient sources and detectors. In particular, pulsed, broadband THz sources anddetectors are becoming increasingly important for emerging applications that take advantage of thetransparency of packaging materials (paper, clothing, etc.) at these frequencies for non-contact spectroscopicimaging. For example, THz has been demonstrated to identify concealed drugs and explosives, and to mapchemical composition in pharmaceutical tablets. Currently available commercial THz systems deployed inindustrial applications rely on fiber-coupled systems, which use photoconductive emission and detection,which can be easily integrated with fiber optics. The THz technology sector is projected to become a $1B peryear industry within the next 10 years, and a competitive advantage in this market requires the development ofnew technology to extend the power and bandwidth of current photoconductive emitters and detectors, whichwill open up new areas of application of this emerging technology, and larger markets. This project aims todevelop a new source that can be exploited for improved efficiency and bandwidth, and which remains robustenough to be integrated into commercial systems. The science behind this new source is based on our previouswork with a new binary phase masking technique, which allowed us to generate world-record THz pulseenergies from photoconductive sources. Using an innovative approach to apply this new technology, the newsource will be developed in this project.