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- Title
Spectral phase control of interfering chirped pulses for high-energy narrowband terahertz generation.
- Authors
Jolly, Spencer W.; Matlis, Nicholas H.; Ahr, Frederike; Leroux, Vincent; Eichner, Timo; Calendron, Anne-Laure; Ishizuki, Hideki; Taira, Takunori; Kärtner, Franz X.; Maier, Andreas R.
- Abstract
Highly-efficient optical generation of narrowband terahertz radiation enables unexplored technologies and sciences from compact electron acceleration to charge manipulation in solids. State-of-the-art conversion efficiencies are currently achieved using difference-frequency generation driven by temporal beating of chirped pulses but remain, however, far lower than desired or predicted. Here we show that high-order spectral phase fundamentally limits the efficiency of narrowband difference-frequency generation using chirped-pulse beating and resolve this limitation by introducing a novel technique based on tuning the relative spectral phase of the pulses. For optical terahertz generation, we demonstrate a 13-fold enhancement in conversion efficiency for 1%-bandwidth, 0.361 THz pulses, yielding a record energy of 0.6 mJ and exceeding previous optically-generated energies by over an order of magnitude. Our results prove the feasibility of millijoule-scale applications like terahertz-based electron accelerators and light sources and solve the long-standing problem of temporal irregularities in the pulse trains generated by interfering chirped pulses. Optical generation of terahertz radiation is needed for many applications, but gaining high efficiency is still a challenge. The authors report a method to overcome dispersion effects in interfering chirp pulses used for THz pulse production by tuning their relative spectral phase, enabling 0.6 mJ of THz energy output.
- Publication
Nature Communications, 2019, Vol 10, Issue 1, pN.PAG
- ISSN
2041-1723
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41467-019-10657-4