Holographic detection of pulsed terahertz waves in terahertz time-domain spectroscopy

Abstract

In the study of the interaction of terahertz (THz) wave with material, the traditional THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) usually only detects the changes in amplitude and phase information of pulsed THz in a certain polarization direction before and after the interaction with the sample to be tested. However, in the detection of material such as anisotropic material and chiral material, only the amplitude and phase information of the sample cannot give the complete internal structure of the sample material. Anisotropic material and chiral material are very sensitive to pulsed THz of different polarization states. In order to reflect the configurations and conformations of these chiral substances through THz spectrum, it is necessary to detect the amplitude, phase and polarization state of the sample before and after pulse THz waves. The pulsed terahertz holographic detector (PTHD) in this work is composed of photoconductive antenna elements that are perpendicular to each other. The quadrature component of the pulsed THz electric field in any direction can be detected by one-time scanning, so that the changes in amplitude, phase and polarization state before and after the pulsed THz wave acts on the sample can be detected at the same time, so it is called pulsed THz wave holographic detection. Both experiments and theoretical analyses verify the reliability of the PTHD for measuring the polarization state of pulsed THz waves. At the same time, the response matrix is used to analyze that the PTHD has good symmetry in a spectral range of 0.1–2.2 THz.