Two-frequency radiation forming on chirped FBG for tuning terahertz carriers generation

Abstract

One of the promising methods for generating continuous sub-terahertz radiation is the method of photomixing, when the photoconductive material is excited by the emission of two optical continuous lasers with frequencies separated by terahertz frequencies. It should be noted that for effective photomixing the polarization, frequencies and phases of the optical beams introduced into the mixer must be constant, otherwise it is necessary to additionally use a complex system of phase synchronization. In connection with the complexity of such an implementation, variants based on the conversion of single-frequency and broadband laser radiation into two-frequency ones were investigated. The first of these is modulation and consists in the external modulation of single-frequency laser radiation in the electro-optical Mach-Zehnder modulator. The second one is broadband with the allocation of two wavelengths using two rectangular fiber Bragg gratings with a small difference in width. The studies were carried out to create a terahertz photoconductor, the distinguishing feature of which is the use of heterostructures grown on a GaAs substrate in the low-temperature regime as a photoconductive material in the form of a thick gradient layer In(x)Al(1-x)As (x = 0 → 1) with artificially created local deformations and with photoconductive composite InGaAs / InAs / InGaAs quantum wells.