British terahertz laser chip sets new record

A paper in Electronics Letters reports that the Leeds team exceeded 1W output power from a quantum cascade terahertz laser.

The new record more than doubles landmarks set by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and subsequently by a team from Vienna last year.

Terahertz waves can penetrate materials that block visible light and uses include monitoring pharmaceutical products, the remote sensing of chemical signatures of explosives in unopened envelopes, and the non-invasive detection of cancers in the human body. 

According to the university, one of the main challenges for scientists and engineers is making the lasers powerful and compact enough to be useful.

In a statement, Prof Edmund Linfield, Professor of Terahertz Electronics in the University’s School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, said: ‘Although it is possible to build large instruments that generate powerful beams of terahertz radiation, these instruments are only useful for a limited set of applications. We need terahertz lasers that not only offer high power but are also portable and low cost.’