Room temperature terahertz wave imaging at 60 fps by frequency up-conversion in DAST crystal

Abstract

Terahertz imaging has attracted a lot of interests for more than 10 years. But real time, high sensitive, low cost THz imaging in room temperature, which is widely needed by fields such as biology, biomedicine and homeland security, has not been fully developed yet. A lot of approaches have been reported on electro-optic (E-O) imaging and THz focal plane arrays with photoconductive antenna or micro-bolometer integrated. In this paper, we report high sensitive realtime THz image at 60 frames per second (fps) employing a commercial infrared camera, using nonlinear optical frequency up-conversion technology. In this system, a flash-lamp pumped nanosecond pulse green laser is used to pump two optical parametric oscillator systems with potassium titanyl phosphate crystals (KTP-OPO). One system with dual KTP crystals is used to generate infrared laser for the pumping of THz difference frequency generation (DFG) in a 4- Dimethylamino-N-Methyl-4-Stilbazolium Tosylate (DAST) crystal. The other one is for generation of pumping laser for THz frequency up-conversion in a second DAST crystal. The THz frequency can be tuned continuously from a few THz to less than 30 THz by controlling the angle of KTP crystals. The frequency up-converted image in infrared region is recorded by a commercial infrared camera working at 60 Hz. Images and videos are presented to show the feasibility of this technique and the real-time ability. Comparison with a general micro-bolometer THz camera shows the high sensitivity of this technique. © 2014 Copyright SPIE.