Abstract-Broadly tunable monolithic room-temperature terahertz quantum cascade laser sources

• Seungyong Jung,
• Aiting Jiang,
• Yifan Jiang,
• Karun Vijayraghavan,
• Xiaojun Wang,
• Mariano Troccoli
• & Mikhail A. Belkin

• http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140711/ncomms5267/full/ncomms5267.html

• Affiliations
• Contributions
• Corresponding author

Electrically pumped room-temperature semiconductor sources of tunable terahertz radiation in 1–5 THz spectral range are highly desired to enable compact instrumentation for THz sensing and spectroscopy. Quantum cascade lasers with intra-cavity difference-frequency generation are currently the only room-temperature electrically pumped semiconductor sources that can operate in the entire 1–5 THz spectral range. Here we demonstrate that this technology is suitable to implementing monolithic room-temperature terahertz tuners with broadband electrical control of the emission frequency. Experimentally, we demonstrate ridge waveguide devices electrically tunable between 3.44 and 4.02 THz.