Terahertz Generation in Lithium Niobate Driven by Ti:Sapphire Laser Pulses and its Limitations
Abstract
We experimentally investigate the limits to 800 nm-to-terahertz (THz) energy conversion in lithium niobate at room temperature driven by amplified Ti:Sapphire laser pulses with tilted-pulse-front. The influence of the pump central wavelength, pulse duration, and fluence on THz generation is studied. We achieved a high peak efficiency of 0.12% using transform limited 150 fs pulses and observed saturation of the optical to THz conversion efficiency at a fluence of 15 mJ/cm2. We experimentally identify two main limitations for the scaling of optical-to-THz conversion efficiencies: (i) the large spectral broadening of the optical pump spectrum in combination with large angular dispersion of the tilted-pulse-front and (ii) free-carrier absorption of THz radiation due to multi-photon absorption of the 800 nm radiation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1406.4949,
title = {Terahertz Generation in Lithium Niobate Driven by Ti:Sapphire Laser Pulses and its Limitations},
author = {Xiaojun Wu and Sergio Carbajo and Koustuban Ravi and Frederike Ahr and Giovanni Cirmi and Yue Zhou and Oliver D. Mücke and Franz X. Kärtner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.4949},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
4 pages, 6 figures