Injection pulse-seeded terahertz-wave parametric generator with gain enhancement in wide frequency range.

Abstract

An injection pulse-seeded terahertz-wave parametric generator (ips-TPG) has been demonstrated with gain enhancement in wide tuning range. Theoretical analysis denotes that the compensation of initial Stokes energy is favorable to the THz gain enhancement in wide frequency range, which is attributed to the improvement on interaction of stimulated polariton scattering (SPS) and difference frequency generation (DFG) processes. In the experiment, the THz frequency tuning range from 1.04 THz to 5.15 THz was achieved based on near-stoichiometric LiNbO3 (SLN) crystal. Compared with the traditional terahertz parametric oscillator (TPO) under the same experimental conditions, a significant enhancement of THz output energy was occurred in high frequency range. As the THz frequency increased from 1.9 THz to 3.6 THz, the enhancement ratios from 1.6 times to 34.7 times were obtained. Besides, the 3dB bandwidth of ips-TPG was measured to be 2.1 THz, which was about 2.6 times that of SLN-TPO. This THz parametric source with a relative flat gain in wide frequency range is suitable to a variety of practical applications.