Theoretical and experimental study on the enhancement of seed injection in terahertz-wave generation
Weipeng Kong, Zeyu Li, Qiang Yan, Mingrui Zou, Xun Zhou, Yu Qin
Abstract
We have studied the seed enhancement of an injection-seeded terahertz (THz)-wave parametric generator (is-TPG) with the help of a theoretical model. During simulation, the power of the seed beam varied from 1 W to 1 MW as the initial condition, while the pump power is set to 18.5 MW. When the peak power of the seed beam reaches megawatt level, the output power of THz wave increases rapidly and the peak position for the THz output dramatically moves towards the front of the crystal. The calculated output power of the injection-pulse-seeded TPG (ips-TPG) with 0.3 MW pulsed seed is 3.4 kW in the case of a surface-emitting configuration and 14 kW in the case of a Si-prism coupled output configuration. The enhancement ratios are 3.5 and 1.4 times, respectively, compared with the watt level CW-seeded is-TPG. Guided by the simulation, we experimentally demonstrated an 11 kW peak power Si-prism output coupled ips-TPG. The enhancement ratio is 1.6 times. The energy of the pulsed seed is 30 µJ (0.3 MW). The pump energy is 7.2 mJ, which is about half that of the typical is-TPG with the same output power. Compared with a typical is-TPG, most of the THz power in ips-TPG accumulates in the front of the crystal and thus is easier to collect. One obvious advantage of ips-TPG is that the output THz energy can be increased while keeping the pump power at a safe level.