Abstract
Many compounds show very strong, and highly specific frequency dependent absorption in the THz range. This feature, together with the ability to focus the THz transients to the diffraction limit [1] offer the opportunity to use THz beams for imaging applications. This is an intriguing application as it allows to acquire spectral information and thus chemical composition information at every pixel of the object. Because of the high brightness of the THz transients, we have managed to speed up the acquisition of a single THz waveform down to millisecond time scales with S/N-ratios still exceeding 100:1. Our early results demonstrate that this system can be used for safe “X-Ray” package inspection, chemical content mapping and environmental monitoring. With more sophisticated signal processing as it is used in speech recognition, we anticipate to be able to obtain chemical composition maps of objects in real time.
© 1995 Optical Society of America
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