Widely Frequency Tunable Terahertz-Wave Emitter Integrating Uni-Traveling-Carrier Photodiode and Extended Bowtie Antenna

We have demonstrated the extremely wide frequency tunable operation of a continuous terahertz (THz) wave emitter based on a uni-traveling-carrier photodiode (UTC-PD). A novel compact planar antenna was integrated with an InP/InGaAs UTC-PD, and assembled in a quasi-optical package. The fabricated module had a responsivity of 0.21 A/W, and was operated at frequencies from 30 GHz to 1.6 THz. The detected output powers were 120 µW at 200 GHz, 17 µW at 500 GHz, and 2.9 µW at 1 THz for a photocurrent of 10 mA with a bias voltage of only -0.6 V.

[1]  J. Whitaker,et al.  Ultrafast carrier dynamics in III-V semiconductors grown by molecular-beam epitaxy at very low substrate temperatures , 1992 .

[2]  K. A. Mcintosh,et al.  Optical and terahertz power limits in the low-temperature-grown GaAs photomixers , 1997 .

[3]  H. Fetterman,et al.  LT-GaAs detector with 451 fs response at 1.55 /spl mu/m via two-photon absorption , 1999 .

[4]  Hiroshi Ito,et al.  InP/InGaAs uni-travelling-carrier photodiode with 310 GHz bandwidth , 2000 .

[5]  M. Koch,et al.  Continuous-wave THz imaging , 2001 .

[6]  Yoshifumi Muramoto,et al.  InP/InGaAs pin photodiode structure maximising bandwidth and efficiency , 2003 .

[7]  Tadao Nagatsuma,et al.  The First Radioastronomical Observation with Photonic Local Oscillator , 2003 .

[8]  Hiroshi Ito,et al.  Photonic terahertz-wave generation using antenna-integrated uni-travelling-carrier photodiode , 2003 .

[9]  H. Ito,et al.  High-speed and high-output InP-InGaAs unitraveling-carrier photodiodes , 2004, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics.

[10]  T. Furuta,et al.  Photonic generation of continuous THz wave using uni-traveling-carrier photodiode , 2005, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[11]  H. Fukano,et al.  A polarization-independent refracting-facet uni-traveling-carrier photodiode with high efficiency and large bandwidth , 2006, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[12]  Francis Hindle,et al.  Detection and quantification of multiple molecular species in mainstream cigarette smoke by continuous-wave terahertz spectroscopy. , 2006, Optics letters.

[13]  Sascha Preu,et al.  Tunable, continuous-wave Terahertz photomixer sources and applications , 2011 .

[14]  Tadao Nagatsuma,et al.  24 Gbit/s data transmission in 300 GHz band for future terahertz communications , 2012 .