Engineers from MIT, the University of Minnesota, and Samsung have created an innovative, low-cost camera capable of detecting terahertz pulses rapidly. It can do so with high sensitivity and at room temperature and pressure, enabling the camera to simultaneously capture information about the orientation of the waves in real-time. Due to its higher sensitivity and speed, it could be used for industrial inspection, airport security, as well as communications in the future.
Technically speaking, the system utilizes particles called quantum dots, which can emit visible light when stimulated by terahertz waves. This visible light can then be recorded by a device similar to a standard electronic camera’s detector and can even be viewed with the naked eye. The camera itself is composed of several layers, developed with standard manufacturing techniques such as those used for microchips. An array of nanoscale parallel lines of gold are separated by narrow slits and lie on the substrate.
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So, what this device is doing is converting that little tiny photon energy into something visible that’s easy to detect with a regular camera. I think that’s really the rate-limiting step: Can you make the [terahertz] signals in a facile way that isn’t expensive? But there’s no question that’s coming,” said Keith Nelson, MIT doctoral student.
