Dispersive Mirror-Based Phase Control in THz Homodyne Systems

In this article, we present an alternative sampling approach for continuous-wave terahertz homodyne systems that overcomes limitations regarding the measurement of dispersive samples of currently used techniques. The wavelength-dependent phase-delay mirrors, which were developed for this work, induce a frequency-dependent phase shift of up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\frac{\pi }{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula>. This technique allows sampling of the THz-field, by tuning the laser sources in such a way that a constant frequency difference is maintained and the center frequency is shifted. In our configuration, the phase shift between transmitter and receiver arms depends only on the center frequency of the lasers. This allows for replacing the movement of a delay stage with variation of the center frequency to capture a THz trace. Consequently, measurements are not constrained by the speed of the delay line anymore. Furthermore, this phase shift is unaffected by differences in path length within the setup and does not require phase modulators. Prior simulations show that these mirrors achieve a phase shift up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\pi$</tex-math></inline-formula> in the C-band for a difference frequency of 280 GHz, which could be confirmed by our measurements. We successfully demonstrated the first application by measuring sample thickness.