EurekAlert July 24, 2019
Current terahertz imaging technologies are expensive to produce and cumbersome to operate. A team of researchers in the US (Princeton University, MIT, University of Notre Dame, Sandia National Laboratory) has demonstrated hyperspectral imaging with chip-scale frequency combs based on terahertz quantum cascade lasers. The dual combs are free-running and emit coherent terahertz radiation that covers a bandwidth of 220 GHz at 3.4 THz with ∼10  μW per line. The combination of the fast acquisition rate of dual-comb spectroscopy with the monolithic design, scalability, and chip-scale size of the combs is highly appealing for future imaging applications in biomedicine and the pharmaceutical industry. While the technology makes the industrial and medical use of terahertz imaging more feasible than before, it still requires cooling to a low temperature, a major hurdle for practical applications…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
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