ABSTRACT
Commercially available mirrors for scanning long-wavelength beams are too large for high-speed imaging. There is a need for a smaller, more agile pointing apparatus to provide images in seconds, not minutes or hours. A fast long-wavelength beam steerer uses a commercial micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) mirror controlled by a high-performance digital signal processor (DSP). The DSP allows high-speed raster scanning of the incident radiation, which is focused to a small waist onto the 9mm(2), gold-coated, MEMS mirror surface, while simultaneously acquiring an undistorted, high spatial-resolution image of an object. The beam steerer hardware, software and performance are described. The system can also serve as a miniaturized, high-performance long-wavelength beam chopper for lock-in detection.
ABSTRACT
We report the first demonstration of a broadband trace gas sensor based on chirp-pulse terahertz spectroscopy. The advent of newly developed solid state sources and sensitive heterodyne detectors for the terahertz frequency range have made it possible to generate and detect precise arbitrary waveforms at THz frequencies with ultra-low phase noise. In order to maximize sensitivity, the sample gas is first polarized using sub-µs chirped THz pulses and the free inductive decays (FIDs) are then detected using a heterodyne receiver. This approach allows for a rapid broadband multi-component sensing with low parts in 10(9) (ppb) sensitivities and spectral frequency accuracy of <20 kHz in real-time. Such a system can be configured into a portable, easy to use, and relatively inexpensive sensing platform.
