Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
Adtech Optics, Inc., 18007 Cortney Court, City of Industry, California 91748, USA.
Nat Commun. 2014 Jul 11;5:4267. doi: 10.1038/ncomms5267.
Electrically pumped room-temperature semiconductor sources of tunable terahertz radiation in 1-5 THz spectral range are highly desired to enable compact instrumentation for THz sensing and spectroscopy. Quantum cascade lasers with intra-cavity difference-frequency generation are currently the only room-temperature electrically pumped semiconductor sources that can operate in the entire 1-5 THz spectral range. Here we demonstrate that this technology is suitable to implementing monolithic room-temperature terahertz tuners with broadband electrical control of the emission frequency. Experimentally, we demonstrate ridge waveguide devices electrically tunable between 3.44 and 4.02 THz.
在 1-5THz 光谱范围内，人们非常希望获得可调节太赫兹辐射的电泵浦室温半导体光源，以实现紧凑的太赫兹传感和光谱仪。腔内差频产生的量子级联激光器是目前唯一能够在整个 1-5THz 光谱范围内工作的室温电泵浦半导体光源。在这里，我们证明了这项技术适用于实现具有宽带电控制发射频率的单片室温太赫兹调谐器。实验上，我们演示了在 3.44 和 4.02THz 之间可调谐的脊波导器件。
