Plasmonic Terahertz Imaging and Spectroscopy Systems

Terahertz waves have unique specifications that enable unprecedented sensing functionalities for personal health monitoring, environmental monitoring, and security screening as well as pharmaceutical, industrial, and agricultural product quality control. This is because most molecules have unique spectral signatures in the terahertz frequency range and many optically opaque materials are relatively transparent to terahertz waves. Additionally, terahertz photons are sufficiently low energy that they don’t cause any damage or ionization especially for biomedical sensing applications. Although unique potentials of terahertz waves have been recognized for quite a while, the low efficiency, higher costs, and bulky nature of traditional terahertz systems has impeded their usage in practical applications. In this talk, I will give an overview of the unique applications of terahertz waves for chemical identification, material characterization, biomedical sensing and diagnostics and describe the state of the existing terahertz imaging and sensing technologies and their limitations. I will introduce a game changing technology that enables high performance, low cost, and compact terahertz spectroscopy and imaging systems for various applications. More specifically, I will introduce plasmonic terahertz imaging and spectroscopy systems, which offer several orders of magnitude higher signal-to-noise ratio levels compared to the state of the art.