Metalenses are essential components in terahertz imaging systems. However, without careful design, they show limited field of view and their practical applications are hindered. Here, a wide-angle metalens is proposed whose structure is optimized for focusing within the incident angles of ±25°. Simulation and experiment results show that the focusing efficiency, spot size, and modulation transfer function of this lens are not sensitive to the incident angle. More importantly, this wide-angle metalens follows the ideal Gaussian formula for the object-image relation, which ensures a wider field of view and better contrast in the imaging experiment.

Terahertz (THz) NH₃ lasing with optical pumping by electron-beam-sustained discharge “long” (∼100µs) CO₂ laser pulses was obtained. The NH₃ laser emission pulses and the “long” pulses of the CO₂ pump laser were simultaneously measured with nanosecond response time. The NH₃ lasing duration and its delay with respect to the pump pulse were measured for various CO₂ laser pulse energies. For the CO₂ laser pump line 9R(30), three wavelengths of 67.2, 83.8, and 88.9 µm were recorded. For the CO₂ laser pump line 9R(16), only a single NH₃ laser line with a wavelength of 90.4 µm was detected.

Terahertz metasurfaces have great applications for efficient terahertz modulation, but there are still problems in designing terahertz metadevices in terms of complexity and inefficiency. Herein, we demonstrate an inversely-designed terahertz metasurface with double electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)-like windows by incorporating a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm with the finite-difference time-domain method. We prepared and tested the metadevices, and the experimental terahertz signals are close to the designed results. By hybridizing amorphous germanium film with the inversely-designed metasurface, two EIT-like windows, including transmission and slow-light effect, exhibit ultrafast modulation behavior in 25 ps excited by a femtosecond laser. The modulation depths of transmission in two transparency windows are 74% and 65%, respectively. The numerical simulations also illustrate the ultrafast dynamic process and modulation mechanism, which match well with the experiment results. Our work thus offers opportunities for designing other objective functions of the terahertz metadevice.

Bilayer graphene, which is highly promising for electronic and optoelectronic applications because of its strong coupling of the Dirac–Fermions, has been studied extensively for the emergent correlated phenomena with magic-angle manipulation. Due to the low energy linear type band gap dispersion relationship, graphene has drawn an amount of optoelectronic devices applications in the terahertz region. However, the strong interlayer interactions modulated electron-electron and electron-phonon coupling, and their dynamics in bilayer graphene have been rarely studied by terahertz spectroscopy. In this study, the interlayer interaction influence on the electron-electron and the electron-phonon coupling has been assigned with the interaction between the two graphene layers. In the ultrafast cooling process in bilayer graphene, the interlayer interaction could boost the electron-phonon coupling process and oppositely reduce the electron-electron coupling process, which led to the less efficient thermalization process. Furthermore, the electron-electron coupling process is shown to be related with the electron momentum scattering time, which increased vividly in bilayer graphene. Our work could provide new insights into the ultrafast dynamics in bilayer graphene, which is of crucial importance for designing multi-layer graphene-based optoelectronic devices.

Terahertz (THz) absorbers for imaging, sensing, and detection are in high demand. However, such devices suffer from high manufacturing costs and limited absorption bandwidths. In this study, we presented a low-cost broadband tunable THz absorber based on one-step laser-induced graphene (LIG). The laser-machining-parameter-dependent morphology and performance of the absorbers were investigated. Coarse tuning of THz absorption was realized by changing the laser power, while it was fine-tuned by changing the scanning speed. The proposed structure can achieve over 90% absorption from 0.5 THz to 2 THz with optimized parameters. The LIG method can help in the development of various THz apparatuses.

With the framework of exterior product, we investigate the relationship between composite multiscale entropy (CMSE) and refractive index and absorption coefficient by reanalyzing six concentrations of bovine serum albumin aqueous solutions from the published work. Two bivectors are constructed by CMSE and its square by the refractive index and absorption coefficient under vectorization. The desirable linear behaviors can be captured, not only between the defined two bivectors in normalized magnitudes, but also between the normalized magnitude of bivectors pertinent to CMSE and the magnitude of a single vector on the refractive index or absorption coefficient, with the processing of optimum selection. Besides that, the relationship between the coefficients of two bivectors is also considered. The results reveal that plenty of sound linear behaviors can be found and also suggest the scale of 15, 16 and frequency of 0.2, 0.21 THz are prominent for those linear behaviors. This work provides a new insight into the correlation between terahertz (THz) time and frequency domain information.

An active ultrafast formation and modulation of dual-band plasmon-induced transparency (PIT) effect is theoretically and experimentally studied in a novel metaphotonic device operating in the terahertz regime, for the first time, to the best of our knowledge. Specifically, we designed and fabricated a triatomic metamaterial hybridized with silicon islands following a newly proposed modulating mechanism. In this mechanism, a localized surface plasmon resonance is induced by the broken symmetry of a C2 structure, acting as the quasi-dark mode. Excited by exterior laser pumps, the photo-induced carriers in silicon promote the quasi-dark mode, which shields the near-field coupling between the dark mode and bright mode supported by the triatomic metamaterial, leading to the dynamical modulation of terahertz waves from individual-band into dual-band PIT effects, with a decay constant of 493 ps. Moreover, a remarkable slow light effect occurs in the modulating process, accompanied by the dual-transparent windows. The dynamical switching technique of the dual-band PIT effect introduced in this work highlights the potential usefulness of this metaphotonic device in optical information processing and communication, including multi-frequency filtering, tunable sensors, and optical storage.

Three-dimensional (3D) refractive index (RI) distribution is important to reveal the object’s inner structure. We implemented terahertz (THz) diffraction tomography with a continuous-wave single-frequency THz source for measuring 3D RI maps. The off-axis holographic interference configuration was employed to obtain the quantitative scattered field of the object under each rotation angle. The 3D reconstruction algorithm adopted the filtered backpropagation method, which can theoretically calculate the exact scattering potential from the measured scattered field. Based on the Rytov approximation, the 3D RI distribution of polystyrene foam spheres was achieved with high fidelity, which verified the feasibility of the proposed method.

We experimentally investigate the linear polarization conversion for terahertz (THz) waves in liquid crystal (LC) integrated metamaterials, which consist of an LC layer sandwiched by two orthogonally arranged sub-wavelength metal gratings. A Fabry–Perot-like cavity is well constructed by the front and rear gratings, and it shows a strong local resonance mechanism, which greatly enhances the polarization conversion efficiency. Most importantly, the Fabry–Perot-like resonance can be actively tuned by modulating the refractive index of the middle LC layer under the external field. As a result, the integrated metamaterial achieves multi-band tunable linear polarization conversion.

This Letter proposes a novel method for enhancing terahertz (THz) radiation from microstructure photoconductive antennas (MSPCA). We present two types of MSPCA, which contain split-ring resonators (SRRs) and dipole photoconductive antennas (D-PCAs). The experimental results reveal that when the femtosecond laser is pumping onto the split position of the SRR, the maximum THz radiation power is enhanced by 92 times compared to pumping at the electrode edge of the D-PCA. Two π phase shifts occur as the pumping laser propagates from the negative electrode to the positive electrode. Analysis shows that photoinduced carrier charges move within the split position of the SRR.