Achromatic prism-type wave plate for broadband terahertz pulses

Abstract

We demonstrated achromatic half- and quarter-wave plates for broadband terahertz pulses using phase retardation by internal total reflection. Prism-type wave plates realized ultra-broadband retardation stability up to 2.5 THz, which was the limitation of our experimental setup. Novel aspects of our work were use of a 3λ/4 plate as a quarter-wave plate and a multistacked prism-type (MSP) wave plate for a large-aperture THz beam. Real-time polarization imaging of two crossed bunches of hairs was performed to show the efficiency of the MSP wave plate. We clearly observed polarization dependence of the hair direction.