ABSTRACT
A recent report from the National Academies outlines that electronic and optics are combining to open up a new “Tera-Era.”1 This vision includes computers performing operations at rates of teraops, terabit-per-second communication systems, and electronic devices on the picosecond time scale. From a spectroscopic point of view, the terahertz (THz) spectral region from 300 GHz (L 1 mm) to 10 THz (L 30 µm) has not yet seen the technological development of optical or microwave frequencies with the result that commercial spectrometers covering the entire spectral range are not yet widely available. This is primarily because of the difculty of generating and detecting THz frequencies compared with the better-established technologies of optics and electronics.
