Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Riccardi, Elisa
• Pistore, Valentino
• Kang, Seonggil
• Seitner, Lukas
• De Vetter, Anna
• Jirauschek, Christian
• Mangeney, Juliette
• Li, Lianhe
• Davies, A. Giles
• Linfield, Edmund H.
• Ferrari, Andrea C.
• Dhillon, Sukhdeep S.
• Vitiello, Miriam S.

Titel

Short pulse generation from a graphene-coupled passively mode-locked terahertz laser

Ist Teil von

• Nature photonics, 2023-07, Vol.17 (7), p.607-614

Ort / Verlag

London: Nature Publishing Group UK

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

Springer Nature - Connect here FIRST to enable access

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The generation of stable trains of ultrashort (femtosecond to picosecond), terahertz-frequency radiation pulses with large instantaneous intensities is an underlying requirement for the investigation of light–matter interactions for metrology and ultrahigh-speed communications. In solid-state electrically pumped lasers, the primary route to generate short pulses is through passive mode-locking; however, this has not yet been achieved in the terahertz range, defining one of the longest standing goals over the past two decades. In fact, the realization of passive mode-locking has long been assumed to be inherently hindered by the fast recovery times associated with the intersubband gain of terahertz lasers. Here we demonstrate a self-starting miniaturized short pulse terahertz laser, exploiting an original device architecture that includes the surface patterning of multilayer-graphene saturable absorbers distributed along the entire cavity of a double-metal semiconductor 2.30–3.55 THz wire laser. Self-starting pulsed emission with 4.0-ps-long pulses is demonstrated in a compact, all-electronic, all-passive and inexpensive configuration. A passively mode-locked quantum cascade laser (QCL) is developed by employing a heterogeneous gain medium and integrating graphene saturable absorbers along the entire QCL waveguide. Self-starting optical pulses of 4.0 ps are electrically generated in the 2.30–3.55 THz frequency range.