Researchers Develop New Lens for Terahertz Radiation

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“That can be particularly interesting if you want to image things at one frequency and not at others,” Mittleman said. “One of the important things here is that this design offers you a versatility that a simple chunk of plastic with a curved surface doesn’t offer.”

The work also suggests that the technique of using spaced metal plates to manipulate terahertz radiation could be useful in making other types of components that currently don’t exist. Since a metallic architecture mimics a plastic (a dielectric), this material technology is called "artificial dielectrics."

“As much as anything else, this paper proves that the technology is feasible,” Mittleman said. “Now we can go and make devices that are totally new in the terahertz world.”

The same technology could be used, Mendis said, to make a polarizing beam splitter for terahertz waves – a device that separates waves according to their polarization state. Such a device could be used to implement elementary logic gates for terahertz photonic systems, where the binary (one and zero) logic states are assigned to the two polarization states. That would be an essential component of a terahertz data network.

“The spirit of this work is to develop a new technology for building terahertz components that might be alternatives to things that exist or that might be new,” Mittleman said. “That’s important for the terahertz field because there aren’t a lot of off-the-shelf components yet.”

Other authors on the paper were Masaya Nagai (professor at Osaka University in Japan), Yiqiu Wang (undergraduate student at Rice University) and Nicholas Karl (doctoral student at Brown).

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Keck Foundation.

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