Broadband THz to NIR up-converter for photon-type THz imaging

High performance terahertz imaging devices have drawn wide attention due to their significant application in healthcare, security of food and medicine, and nondestructive inspection, as well as national security applications. Here we demonstrate a broadband terahertz photon-type up-conversion imagin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2019-08, Vol.10 (1), p.3513-9, Article 3513
Main Authors: Bai, Peng, Zhang, Yueheng, Wang, Tianmeng, Fu, Zhanglong, Shao, Dixiang, Li, Ziping, Wan, Wenjian, Li, Hua, Cao, Juncheng, Guo, Xuguang, Shen, Wenzhong
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/624/1075/401
639/766/400/561
Arsenides
Blackbody
Broadband
Charge coupled devices
Gallium
Gallium arsenide
Helium
Homojunctions
Humanities and Social Sciences
Imaging
Incident light
Inspection
Light emitting diodes
Liquid helium
multidisciplinary
Nondestructive testing
Photoelectric emission
Photons
Quantum efficiency
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Terahertz frequencies
Up-converters
Upconversion
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Summary:High performance terahertz imaging devices have drawn wide attention due to their significant application in healthcare, security of food and medicine, and nondestructive inspection, as well as national security applications. Here we demonstrate a broadband terahertz photon-type up-conversion imaging device, operating around the liquid helium temperature, based on the gallium arsenide homojunction interfacial workfunction internal photoemission (HIWIP)-detector-LED up-converter and silicon CCD. Such an imaging device achieves broadband response in 4.2–20 THz and can absorb the normal incident light. The peak responsivity is 0.5 AW −1 . The light emitting diode leads to a 72.5% external quantum efficiency improvement compared with the one widely used in conventional up-conversion devices. A peak up-conversion efficiency of 1.14 × 10 −2 is realized and the optimal noise equivalent power is 29.1 pWHz −1/2 . The up-conversion imaging for a 1000 K blackbody pin-hole is demonstrated. This work provides a different imaging scheme in the terahertz band. Designing high performance THz pixelless imaging devices is nowadays challenging due to the inability to obtain normal incidence excitation using a grating coupler. Here, the authors report a broadband GaAs HIWIP-LED THz-NIR up-conversion imaging device avoiding the use of any grating coupler.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-019-11465-6