Room Temperature Coherent and Voltage Tunable Terahertz Emission from Nanometer-Sized Field Effect Transistors

We report on reflective electro-optic sampling measurements of TeraHertz emission from nanometer-gate-length InGaAs-based high electron mobility transistors. The room temperature coherent gate-voltage tunable emission is demonstrated. We establish that the physical mechanism of the coherent TeraHertz emission is related to the plasma waves driven by simultaneous current and optical excitation. A significant shift of the plasma frequency and the narrowing of the emission with increasing channels current are observed and explained as due to the increase of the carriers density and drift velocity.

THz emission induced by optical beating in nanometer-length field-effect-transistors

Experimental results of direct measurement of resonant monochromatic terahertz emission optically excited in InGaAs transistor channels are presented. The emission is attributed to two-dimensional plasma waves excited by photogeneration of electron-hole pairs in the channel at the frequency $f_0$ of the beating of two cw-laser sources. The presence of resonances for the radiation emission in the range of $f_0pm 10$ GHz (with $f_0$ from 0.3 up to 0.5 THz) detected by a Si-bolometer is found. Numerical results support that such a high quality of the emission resonances can be explained by the approach of an instability in the transistor channel.