High power broadband terahertz pulse generation using chirped aperiodically poled structures

Abstract

This paper presents a novel scheme for generation of high power short THz pulses using optical rectification. The procedure consists of two main steps. In the first step, generation of a chirped broadband THz pulse is proposed using a chirped aperiodically poled lithium niobate (APLN) crystal. In order to design a crystal with optimum generation efficiency, we take advantage of binary optimization techniques. The second step is compression of the pulses extracted from the APLN structure. For this purpose, we design chirped mirrors in the THz regime, which introduce certain group delay dispersion to the pulse propagation, thereby minimizing the chirp in the input THz pulse.