Abstract
This chapter introduces the concept of using conventional optical/infrared lasers to produce terahertz radiation. These techniques are of great interest not only due to the high spectral, spatial, and temporal qualities of the terahertz radiation that they can produce, but also due to the practicality of compact, room temperature systems that are based on turn-key, off-the-shelf technologies. More specifically, this chapter describes the intracavity terahertz parametric oscillator (ICTPO), which is one of the simplest and most practical laser-based terahertz sources. In the first part the considerations necessary when designing an ICTPO are discussed, and the description of a realised system is given. The ICTPO produced nanosecond terahertz pulses that were tunable from \(<\)0.9 to \(>\)3.05 THz, with peak powers of several Watts. Typical terahertz bandwidths were only \(\sim \)50 GHz, and were further reduced to 500 MHz with the simple addition of etalons in the optical fields. This narrow bandwidth makes the ICTPO complementary to terahertz time domain spectroscopy, where the bandwidth spans several to tens of THz. In the second part the application of the ICTPO in standoff spectroscopy of explosives is discussed. Here, the narrow linewidth allows the available power to be tuned into atmospheric transmission windows, and the non-reliance on coherent detection reduces artificial features in the obtained spectrum. An example is given where the ICTPO was used for real-world standoff spectroscopy at a range of 8 m (16 m round-trip), yielding one to two orders of magnitude improvement in the useable range compared to other sources.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks go to Dr D.J.M. Stothard for his work in collecting the data and producing the figures for the THz beam profiling and imaging demonstration and to Dr T.J. Edwards and C.L.Thomson for providing figures for the temporal traces of the ICTPO pulses and the variation of absorption width of the 1.4969 THz absorption line respectively. Finally, M.H. Dunn is thanked for his assistance in producing this work.
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Malcolm, G.P.A., Walsh, D.A., Chateauneuf, M. (2014). Physics and Applications of T-Rays. In: Perenzoni, M., Paul, D. (eds) Physics and Applications of Terahertz Radiation. Springer Series in Optical Sciences, vol 173. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3837-9_6
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