Chapters authored
Terahertz Nanoantennas for Enhanced Spectroscopy
Terahertz spectroscopy has great potential for sensing a wide range of elementary excitations. However, terahertz studies are practically limited to macroscopic ensembles of compounds (e.g., thick pellets of crystallized molecules or highly concentrated solutions of nanomaterials) due to the long radiation wavelength (about 300 μm at 1 THz). In this chapter, we show how terahertz nanoantennas can overcome the current limitations of terahertz spectroscopy such as low sensitivity and low spatial resolution. We briefly discuss how to design the resonance characteristics of a dipole nanoantenna through a Fabry-Pérot model, and then we present the experimental characterization of the spectral response of ordered arrays of such devices. Furthermore, we demonstrate how nanoantenna arrays enable the possibility of retrieving the spectroscopic signature of a monolayer of quantum dots and, in principle, of many other organic or inorganic compounds. This technique, based on the idea of increasing the sensitivity through local field enhancement, is named nanoantenna-enhanced terahertz spectroscopy (NETS). A Fano-like interference between the fundamental mode of the nanoantennas and the phonon resonance of the quantum dots is observed, together with an enhancement of the absorption of the dots up to more than a million. Finally, we show how to extract the main spectroscopic information of the quantum dots through a simple coupled harmonic oscillator model. This novel technique can be widely applied in terahertz spectroscopic studies of nanocrystals and molecules, where extremely low concentrations are of concern.
Part of the book: Terahertz Spectroscopy