Abstract-THz generation by optical rectification of near-infrared laser pulses in the organic nonlinear optical crystal HMQ-TMS

Fabian D. J. Brunner, Seung-Heon Lee, O-Pil Kwon, and Thomas Feurer  »View Author Affiliations

Optical Materials Express, Vol. 4, Issue 8, pp. 1586-1592 (2014)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OME.4.001586

http://www.opticsinfobase.org/ome/abstract.cfm?uri=ome-4-8-1586

We show that the organic electro-optic crystal HMQ-TMS [2-(4-hydroxy-3-methoxystyryl)-1-methylquinolinium 2,4,6-trimethylbenzenesulfonate] has favorable properties for the parametric generation of THz waves in a collinear type-0 phase-matching scheme, i.e., a low absorption coefficient at wavelengths from 800 to 1500 nm (α < 1.5cm⁻¹), a relatively low absorption coefficient at frequencies from 0.3 to 1.5 THz (α < 100 cm⁻¹), and a large coherence length in these spectral ranges (l_c > 0.5 mm). We demonstrate efficient generation of broadband THz pulses through optical rectification of sub-picosecond laser pulses in a 0.2 mm thick HMQ-TMS crystal at the wavelength of 1000 nm. The energy conversion efficiency achieved in this crystal was 41 times higher than the one achieved in a 0.3 mm thick GaP crystal, which is an often used material for collinearly phase-matched THz generation at this laser wavelength. The peak amplitudes of the THz signal obtained with the HMQ-TMS crystal were 5.4 times larger in the time-domain and 7.1 times larger in the frequency-domain than the ones obtained with the GaP crystal.

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