Fabrication and Characterization of an 8 × 8 Terahertz Photoconductive Antenna Array for Spatially Resolved Time Domain Spectroscopy and Imaging Applications

Abstract

Terahertz (THz) technology is promising in several applications such as imaging, spectroscopy and communications. Among several methods in the generation and detection of THz waves, a THz time-domain system that is developed using photoconductive antennas (PCA) as emitter and detector presents several advantages such as simple alignment, low cost, high performance etc. In this work, we report the design, fabrication and characterization of a 2-D PCA array that is capable of detecting both the amplitude and phase of the THz pulse. The PCA array is fabricated using LT-GaAs and has 8 channels with 64 pixels ( $8 \times 8$ ). A novel approach using a spatial light modulator (SLM) to steer and focus the infrared probe beam towards pixels of the PCA array is presented. Each channel records the photocurrent generated by the THz signal (amplitude and phase) separately and frequencies up to 1.4 THz can be detected. Furthermore, the parameters such as directional time delay of the THz pulse, crosstalk between the channels etc., were characterized. Finally, we show that the proposed 2D PCA array design is flexible and can be used for accelerated THz spectral image acquisition.

Keywords

• Multipixel detector
• photoconductive antenna array
• terahertz imaging
• THz time-domain system