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-Enabling switchable and multifunctional terahertz metasurfaces with phase-change material

Dacheng Wang, Song Sun, Zheng Feng, and Wei Tan

(a) 3D schematic view of phase-change metasurfaces with switchable and diverse functionalities. Incident terahertz wave is normally irradiated with polarization along x-axis. (b) Top view and (c) side view of the unit cell of the metasurface. The optimized geometrical dimensions are px = py = 135 µm, g1 = 30 µm, g2 = g3 = 10 µm, l = 90 µm, w = 1 µm, d = 15 µm, t1 = 350 nm, t2 = 60 µm, and t3 = 500 nm, respectively.

https://www.osapublishing.org/ome/abstract.cfm?uri=ome-10-9-2054

Achieving switchable and diversified functionalities in a single metasurface has garnered great research interest for potential terahertz applications. Here, we propose and demonstrate a phase-change metasurface that simultaneously supports broadband electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) and broadband nearly perfect absorption, depending on the phase state of a phase change material-vanadium dioxide (VO2). The phase-change metasurface is composed of a VO2 nanofilm, a quartz spacer and gold split-square-ring resonators with VO2 nanopads embedded into the splits. When VO2 is in its insulating phase at room temperature, a broadband EIT window (maximum transmittance reaching 83%) with a bandwidth of 0.27 THz (relative bandwidth 30%) can be observed. Alternatively, when VO2 transforms into its fully metallic phase, the EIT functionality will be switched off and instead, the metasurface operates as a broadband absorber with the total absorption exceeding 93% and a bandwidth of 0.5 THz (relative bandwidth 74%). The electric and magnetic field distributions indicate that the broadband EIT stems from the bright-bright mode coupling and the broadband absorption arises from the excitation and superposition of two resonances within a metal-insulator-metal cavity. The design scheme is scalable from terahertz to infrared and optical frequencies, enabling new avenues towards switchable and multifunctional meta-devices.

© 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

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-Flexible terahertz modulators based on graphene FET with organic high-k dielectric layer

Yu-Lian He, Jing-Bo Liu, Tian-Long Wen, Qing-Hui Yang, Zheng Feng, Wei Tan, Xue-Song Li, Qi-Ye Wen, Huai-Wu Zhang

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2053-1591/aadeca

Graphene field-effect-transistor (GFET) based terahertz (THz) modulators usually possess an unfulfilling modulation depth (MD) of 15% ~ 20%. In this work we developed a flexible GFET based THz modulator, where the graphene monolayer is coated with an organic high-K dielectric as the screening layer and an ion-gel layer as the gate. With this exquisite composite modulating structure, the new device possesses a significantly enhanced modulation depth (MD) up to 70% over a broad frequency band, an extremely low insert loss (IL) of 1.3 dB, and unexpected good structural and properties stability. The large intrinsic MD, low IL, as well as its flexibility, render this performance enhanced modulator versatile in fabrication of novel THz devices, such as multi-level modulator, for nonplanar or wearable applications.

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.