A breakthrough in developing multi-watt terahertz lasers

Phys.org  June 11, 2020
Plasmonic lasers suffer from low output power and divergent beams due to their subwavelength metallic cavities. A team of researchers in the US (Leigh University, Sandia National Laboratory) longitudinally coupled an array of metallic microcavities through traveling plasmon waves which led to radiation in a single spectral mode and a diffraction limited single-lobed beam in the surface normal direction. They implemented the scheme for terahertz plasmonic quantum-cascade lasers and measured peak output power in excess of 2W for a single-mode 3.3THz QCL radiating in a narrow single-lobed beam, when operated at 58K in a compact Stirling cooler. The number of photons radiated from the cavity outnumber those absorbed within its claddings and semiconductor medium, which constitutes >50% radiative efficiency…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE

Multi-watt emission is demonstrated for single-mode terahertz lasers in which more photons are radiated from the laser array than those absorbed within the array as optical losses… Credit: Yuan Jin, Lehigh University

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