The biggest barrier for many scientific and commercial applications in communications, spectroscopy, life sciences, food safety, biomedicine as well as industrial metrology is the lack of appropriate sources and detectors of THz radiation with enough power and sensitivity with small footprints and portability. Currently available photonic based THz systems have already demonstrated great potential in terms of high tunability, standard room temperature operation, and signal quality, however they are still suffering from many drawbacks, such as big size equipment (needs an optical table), mechanical disturbance (additional to noise and alignment), high power consumption (electrical and optical), and low flexibility system (each application needs a new setup). We therefore propose a new THz system platform, aimed to overcome all the above drawbacks, based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and nanotechnology.
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