Ghost spintronic THz-emitter-array microscope

Si-Chao Chen; Zheng Feng; Jiang Li; Wei Tan; Liang-Hui Du; Jianwang Cai; Yuncan Ma; Kang He; Haifeng Ding; Zhao-Hui Zhai; Ze-Ren Li; Cheng-Wei Qiu; Xi-Cheng Zhang; Li-Guo Zhu

doi:10.1038/s41377-020-0338-4

Ghost spintronic THz-emitter-array microscope

Light Sci Appl. 2020 Jun 8:9:99. doi: 10.1038/s41377-020-0338-4. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Si-Chao Chen^#^{1

2}, Zheng Feng^#³, Jiang Li^#^{1

3}, Wei Tan^#³, Liang-Hui Du^{1

3}, Jianwang Cai⁴, Yuncan Ma¹, Kang He⁵, Haifeng Ding⁵, Zhao-Hui Zhai^{1

3}, Ze-Ren Li¹, Cheng-Wei Qiu⁶, Xi-Cheng Zhang⁷, Li-Guo Zhu^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Fluid Physics, China Academy of Engineering Physics, Mianyang, 621900 Sichuan China.
² Department of Optics and Optical Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026 Anhui China.
³ Microsystem & Terahertz Research Center, China Academy of Engineering Physics, Chengdu, 610200 Sichuan China.
⁴ Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190 Beijing, China.
⁵ National Laboratory of Solid-State Microstructures and Department of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093 Jiangsu China.
⁶ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Engineering Drive 3, Singapore, 117583 Singapore.
⁷ The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627 USA.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Terahertz (THz) waves show great potential in nondestructive testing, biodetection and cancer imaging. Despite recent progress in THz wave near-field probes/apertures enabling raster scanning of an object's surface, an efficient, nonscanning, noninvasive, deep subdiffraction imaging technique remains challenging. Here, we demonstrate THz near-field microscopy using a reconfigurable spintronic THz emitter array (STEA) based on the computational ghost imaging principle. By illuminating an object with the reconfigurable STEA followed by computing the correlation, we can reconstruct an image of the object with deep subdiffraction resolution. By applying an external magnetic field, in-line polarization rotation of the THz wave is realized, making the fused image contrast polarization-free. Time-of-flight (TOF) measurements of coherent THz pulses further enable objects at different distances or depths to be resolved. The demonstrated ghost spintronic THz-emitter-array microscope (GHOSTEAM) is a radically novel imaging tool for THz near-field imaging, opening paradigm-shifting opportunities for nonintrusive label-free bioimaging in a broadband frequency range from 0.1 to 30 THz (namely, 3.3-1000 cm^-1).

Keywords: Super-resolution microscopy; Terahertz optics.

Abstract

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