Integrated THz Spectroscopy exploiting On-chip Scattering and Device Nonlinearity

太赫兹(THz)光谱在成像、无损质量控制、生物医学、化学和空气污染传感、细胞生物学、晶体工程、爆炸物和假药识别等方面具有广泛的潜在应用前景。然而，在这一光谱区域缺乏充分和成本效益高的仪器开发，导致它被称为“太赫兹”缺口，并对其应用空间的发展产生了不利影响。然而，随着纳米技术、材料科学和光学的新发展，在这个频率范围内重新出现了活跃的研究兴趣，研究界正在从广泛的科学学科来探讨技术的发展。该项目的成功可以使用于上述应用的坚固、低成本的集成THz光谱系统成为可能。这种针对太赫兹频率区域的低成本解决方案将使从事该领域的研究人员和科学家能够迅速创新新技术，这些技术可以在我们的日常生活中广泛使用。PI还希望这项研究将在多学科领域吸引和培训研究生和本科生，这些领域对于解决未来具有挑战性的研究问题至关重要。PI还将吸引当地学校的高三学生，并通过他提议的两门课程以及出版物、研讨会和工作坊广泛传播知识。基于太赫兹的光谱学据称在生物医学和化学分析中有广泛的应用。目前在时间域进行太赫兹光谱的技术主要依赖于昂贵的光学器件，包括飞秒激光器、光导衬底、非线性光学元件和机械部件，这使得系统昂贵、笨重且不适合集成。另一方面，固态技术使用经典的下转换架构执行频域光谱。它需要覆盖整个太赫兹范围的大量频率合成器和乘法器，这使得它不适合集成。这一建议提出了一种电磁-电路-非线性估计横切方法，通过从电磁散射中提取光谱信息，实现了室温下芯片尺度的太赫兹光谱。关键思想是，片上接收器和输入太赫兹波本身之间的电磁接口创造了对入射信号执行频谱分析的机会，而不需要传统接收器跟随它。这项建议寻求通过测量芯片上的电磁散射来建立频谱估计的分析框架。它提出了通过在芯片上测量由于太赫兹波入射而在平面天线结构上感应的表面电流分布的幅度来估计这种散射的技术。此外，该方案还试图利用检测器的非线性来提取入射信号频谱的时域特征或相位信息。这可能会使电池供电的芯片规模的太赫兹光谱仪在广泛的传感和成像应用中发挥作用。

Terahertz (THz) spectroscopy has a wide range of potential applications in imaging, non-destructive quality control, biomedical, chemical and air pollution sensing, cell biology, crystal engineering, identification of explosives and counterfeit drugs. However, lack of adequate and cost-effective instrumentation development in this spectral region has contributed to it being called the 'THz' gap, and has adversely affected the development of its application space. However, with new developments in nanotechnology, material science and optics, there has been a resurgence of active research interest in this frequency range and the research community are approaching the technology development from a broad range of scientific disciplines. The success of this project can enable robust, low-cost integrated, THz spectroscopic systems for the aforementioned applications. Such low-cost solutions for the THz frequency region will enable researchers and scientists engaged in this field to rapidly innovate on new technologies that can find extensive use in our daily lives. The PI also expects that this research will engage and train both graduate and undergraduate students in multi-disciplinary fields, which are vitally important for solving challenging research problems for the future. The PI will also engage high-school seniors from local schools and broadly disseminate the knowledge through his proposed two courses and through publications, seminars and workshops.THz-based spectroscopy is purported to have a wide range of applications in biomedical and chemical analysis. Current technology to perform THz spectroscopy in the time domain mostly relies on expensive optics including femtosecond lasers, photoconductive substrates, nonlinear optical elements and mechanical components making the system expensive, bulky and not amenable to integration. On the other hand, solid-state technology performs frequency domain spectroscopy using the classical down-conversion architecture. It requires a large bank of frequency synthesizers and multipliers covering the entire THz range making it unsuitable for integration. This proposal presents an electromagnetics-circuits-nonlinear estimation crosscut approach to enable chip-scale THz spectroscopy at room temperature through extraction of spectral information from electromagnetic scattering. The key idea is that an electromagnetic interface between the on-chip receiver and the incoming THz wave itself creates an opportunity to perform spectral analysis of the incident signal, without requiring the traditional receiver following it. This proposal seeks to establish the analytical framework for spectral estimation by measuring on-chip electromagnetic scattering. It proposes techniques to estimate such scattering by measuring on-chip the magnitude of the induced surface current distribution on the planar antenna structure due to the incidence of the THz wave. In addition, this proposal also seeks to exploit nonlinearity of the detectors to extract time-domain signature or phase information of the spectrum of the incident signal. This can potentially enable battery-powered, chip-scale THz spectroscopes for a wide range of sensing and imaging applications.