THz RADIATION GENERATION VIA LASER PLASMA INTERACTION EXPERIMENTS

Recently radiation generation from the interaction between laser and plasma is studied. Terahertz radiation from photo-conductive antenna which is based on semiconductor technology is widely used, The power is in the order of nano-watt level so that it is hard to use for application. On the other hand, terahertz radiation from laser plasma interaction is much higher than that of semiconductor technology. In our experiments, we have studied by use DARC (dc to ac radiation converter) mechanism by using YAG laser with nano-second pulse duration. DARC is novel radiation source using the interaction between laser-created ionization front and static electric field. The frequency of radiation is determined by both plasma density of ionization front and the geometry of DARC structure. We observed radiation pulse of frequency of 1.2 THz and pulse duration of 2 ps with ZnSe crystal as media detected by EO (electro-optics) sampling technique.

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