Abstract-Laser pulse induced efficient terahertz emission from Co/Al heterostructures

Hui Zhang, Zheng Feng, Jine Zhang, He Bai, Huaiwen Yang, Jianwang Cai, Weisheng Zhao, Wei Tan, Fengxia Hu, Baogen Shen, and Jirong Sun

https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.102.024435

Investigation on terahertz (THz) emission is important not only for fundamental research but also for practical application. A rapidly developing approach to generate THz emission is using a heterostructure composed of ferromagnetic metal (FM) and nonmagnetic metal (NM) which is pumped by femtosecond laser pulse. Previous works in this regard mainly focused on bilayer with heavy NM (such as Pt) with a large spin Hall angle. Here we present a comprehensive investigation on THz emission from Co/Al heterostructures stemming from the inverse spin Hall effect. It is surprising to find that although the spin Hall angle of Al is two orders of magnitude smaller than that of Pt, the measured THz signals are close to one-third of that of the typical Co/Pt heterostructures. To explore the underlying physics, theoretical models are employed to investigate the spin-related properties of Al. We obtain that the upper limit of the spin Hall angle of Al is 0.55% and the spin-diffusion length is 2.2 ± 0.2 nm; the diffusion length is comparable to that of Pt (2.3 ± 0.1 nm). This work shows that it is worth revisiting light metals for the spintronic THz emitter.

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Abstract-Ghost spintronic THz-emitter-array microscope

Si-Chao Chen, Zheng Feng, Jiang Li, Wei Tan, Liang-Hui Du, Jianwang Cai, Yuncan Ma, Kang He, Haifeng Ding, Zhao-Hui Zhai, Ze-Ren Li, Cheng-Wei Qiu, Xi-Cheng Zhang,  Li-Guo Zhu

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-020-0338-4

Terahertz (THz) waves show great potential in nondestructive testing, biodetection and cancer imaging. Despite recent progress in THz wave near-field probes/apertures enabling raster scanning of an object’s surface, an efficient, nonscanning, noninvasive, deep subdiffraction imaging technique remains challenging. Here, we demonstrate THz near-field microscopy using a reconfigurable spintronic THz emitter array (STEA) based on the computational ghost imaging principle. By illuminating an object with the reconfigurable STEA followed by computing the correlation, we can reconstruct an image of the object with deep subdiffraction resolution. By applying an external magnetic field, in-line polarization rotation of the THz wave is realized, making the fused image contrast polarization-free. Time-of-flight (TOF) measurements of coherent THz pulses further enable objects at different distances or depths to be resolved. The demonstrated ghost spintronic THz-emitter-array microscope (GHOSTEAM) is a radically novel imaging tool for THz near-field imaging, opening paradigm-shifting opportunities for nonintrusive label-free bioimaging in a broadband frequency range from 0.1 to 30 THz (namely, 3.3–1000 cm−1).

Abstract-Highly-efficient spintronic terahertz emitter enabled by metal-dielectric photonic crystal

Zheng Feng, Rui Yu, Yu Zhou, Hai Lu, Wei Tan, Hu Deng, Quancheng Liu, Zhaohui Zhai, Liguo Zhu, Jianwang Cai, Bingfeng Miao, Haifeng Ding

https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.03069

Spintronic terahertz (THz) emitter provides the advantages such as apparently broader spectrum, significantly lower cost, and more flexibility in compared with the commercial THz emitters, and thus attracts great interests recently. In past few years, efforts have been made in optimizing the material composition and structure geometry, and the conversion efficiency has been improved close to that of ZnTe crystal. One of the drawbacks of the current designs is the rather limited laser absorption - more than 50% energy is wasted and the conversion efficiency is thus limited. Here, we theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel device that fully utilizes the laser intensity and significantly improves the conversion efficiency. The device, which consists of a metal-dielectric photonic crystal structure, utilizes the interference between the multiple scattering waves to simultaneously suppress the reflection and transmission of the laser, and to reshape the laser field distributions. The experimentally detected laser absorption and THz generations show one-to-one correspondence with the theoretical calculations. We achieve the strongest THz pulse emission that presents a 1.7 times improvement compared to the currently designed spintronic emitter. This work opens a new pathway to improve the performance of spintronic THz emitter from the perspective of optics.