Femtosecond optical pulse shaping for tunable terahertz pulse generation

Abstract

We report on the generation of phase-locked terahertz pulse pairs and tunable narrow-band terahertz pulses by means of optical pulse shaping combining a liquid crystal spatial light filter and optical rectification in ZnTe. They are generated through simple sinusoidal and/or triangular phase modulations and do not require any optimization algorithm. The corresponding spectra are tunable between 0.5 and 2.5 THz with a spectral bandwidth as narrow as 140 GHz.