Emission of terahertz electromagnetic waves by vortex flow in high-Tc superconductors

Abstract

Continuous terahertz electromagnetic waves have new applications in scientific and industrial fields such as medicine and information technology. Cuprate high-temperature superconductors have a layer structure, and form a naturally multi-connected Josephson junction system called intrinsic Josephson junction (IJJ). In IJJ, there appears a new excitation called the Josephson plasma. Its frequency is in the region of terahertz inside the superconducting energy gap. The excited plasma wave is converted into an electromagnetic wave at sample surfaces. Therefore the IJJ has a great potential to generate terahertz continuous wave. Here we report the results of simulations to find the optimum condition for obtaining the strongest emission power of the terahertz waves. The simulations were carried out using our theory. Since the simulation uses very large-sized coupled nonlinear equations therefore difficult to compute, we used the fastest supercomputer named as Earth Simulator. We found that the quite intense continuous terahertz coherent wave is emitted from a small sample with high-energy efficiency.