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THz Wavefront Engineering

Created 4 days ago

Anchor paper: A.W. Schiff-Kearn, L. Gingras, S. Bernier, N. Chamanara, K. Agarwal, et al., "Front-induced transitions control THz waves," Communications Physics 4, 162 (2021). [arXiv:2102.02879]

Background

Terahertz (THz) pulses are central to spectroscopy, imaging, and emerging wireless communications, but shaping their waveform — stretching, compressing, reversing, or frequency-converting — has conventionally relied on static nonlinear-optical media requiring intense THz fields. Open question: could a dynamically engineered, moving medium manipulate THz waves more directly? One route: photoexcite a sheet of free carriers ("front") sweeping through a semiconductor waveguide at a controllable, potentially relativistic velocity — a regime not yet experimentally realized or systematically characterized for THz control.

New results

The authors introduce SLIPSTREAM: relativistically moving photoionization fronts in a silicon-filled parallel-plate waveguide, generated by a near-infrared pump pulse, used to directly manipulate a co-propagating THz wave. In the sub-luminal regime, the interaction produces temporally stretched, quasi-static THz plateau pulses lasting several picoseconds, tunable via the front's interaction distance and carrier density. In the super-luminal regime, the front induces an intra-band transition in the wave's dispersion relation that performs a time-reversal operation on the THz waveform, along with non-reciprocal wave behavior — confirmed via both simulated dispersion analysis and time-resolved THz measurements.

SLIPSTREAM moving-front THz platform schematic
Fig. 1 — schematic of the SLIPSTREAM platform: a near-IR pump pulse photoinjects a moving carrier front in a silicon-filled waveguide, generating tunable THz plateau pulses across sub-luminal, luminal, and super-luminal front-velocity regimes.

Related work in this direction

  • "Steering the Slipstream: Moving Fronts to Tailor Terahertz Pulses," CLEO: Science and Innovations (2021).
  • "Tailoring Terahertz Pulses with Moving Fronts: Temporal Stretching and Time-Reversal," IRMMW-THz conference (2020).

This is a genuinely separate applied-photonics excursion from Agarwal's quantum many-body theory, connected mainly by an abstract idea: the same "engineered moving front outrunning a system's natural signal velocity" trick that drives Engineered Spacetime Quenches for Critical-State Preparation, here applied to classical nonlinear optics instead of quantum many-body state preparation.

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