Terahertz (THz) waves show great potential in nondestructive testing, biodetection and cancer imaging. Despite recent progress in THz wave near-field probes/apertures enabling raster scanning of an object’s surface, an efficient, nonscanning, noninvasive, deep subdiffraction imaging technique remains challenging. Here, we demonstrate THz near-field microscopy using a reconfigurable spintronic THz emitter array (STEA) based on the computational ghost imaging principle. By illuminating an object with the reconfigurable STEA followed by computing the correlation, we can reconstruct an image of the object with deep subdiffraction resolution. By applying an external magnetic field, in-line polarization rotation of the THz wave is realized, making the fused image contrast polarization-free. Time-of-flight (TOF) measurements of coherent THz pulses further enable objects at different distances or depths to be resolved. The demonstrated ghost spintronic THz-emitter-array microscope (GHOSTEAM) is a radically novel imaging tool for THz near-field imaging, opening paradigm-shifting opportunities for nonintrusive label-free bioimaging in a broadband frequency range from 0.1 to 30 THz (namely, 3.3–1000 cm⁻¹).

A standoff 3-D imaging radar for security body scan at 340 GHz has been described. This terahertz imager incorporates a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) array as an electronic beam former in a horizontal dimension and an elliptic cylinder as a focusing reflector in elevation. Frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) emission with 16-GHz bandwidth caused a 10-mm-range resolution after calibration for nonlinearities of the distorted radar signals. The horizontal MIMO array contains 4 transmitters and 16 receivers (4Tx-16Rx) to generate a 64-Tx/Rx full virtual array corresponding to an antenna size of approximately 128 mm, which caused a horizontal resolution of about 14 mm at a distance of 3 m. FMCW signals were transmitted from the 4-Tx sequentially and focused as narrow beam lines by the elliptic reflector to get a 12-mm vertical resolution at 3 m. A fast-scanning mirror swings in the light path to make these beam lines screen in the vertical direction. A 4-Hz frame rate is now possible for a personal screen with a field of view of 2 m × 0.6 m.

We proposed an ultrasensitive specific terahertz sensor consisting of two sets of graphene micro-ribbon with different widths. The interference between the plasmon resonances of the wide and narrow graphene micro-ribbons gives rise to the plasmon induced transparency (PIT) effect and enables ultrasensitive sensing in terahertz region. The performances of the PIT sensor have been analyzed in detail considering the thickness and refractive index sensing applications using full wave electromagnetic simulations. Taking advantage of the electrical tunability of graphene’s Fermi level, we demonstrated the specific sensing of benzoic acid with detection limit smaller than 6.35 µg/cm². The combination of specific identification and enhanced sensitivity of the PIT sensor opens exciting prospects for bio/chemical molecules sensing in the terahertz region.

We demonstrate terahertz (THz) wave near-field imaging with a spatial resolution of $\sim 4.5\mathrm{\mu m}$ using single-pixel compressive sensing enabled by femtosecond-laser ($fs$-laser) driven vanadium dioxide (${\mathrm{VO}}_2$)-based spatial light modulator. By $fs$-laser patterning a 180 nm thick ${\mathrm{VO}}_2$ nanofilm with a digital micromirror device, we spatially encode the near-field THz evanescent waves. With single-pixel Hadamard detection of the evanescent waves, we reconstructed the THz wave near-field image of an object from a serial of encoded sequential measurements, yielding improved signal-to-noise ratio by one order of magnitude over a raster-scanning technique. Further, we demonstrate that the acquisition time was compressed by a factor of over four with 90% fidelity using a total variation minimization algorithm. The proposed THz wave near-field imaging technique inspires new and challenging applications such as cellular imaging.

Femtosecond laser filamentation is a unique nonlinear optical phenomenon when high-power ultrafast laser propagation in all transparent optical media. During filamentation in the atmosphere, the ultrastrong field of 10¹³–10¹⁴ W/cm² with a large distance ranging from meter to kilometers can effectively ionize, break, and excite the molecules and fragments, resulting in characteristic fingerprint emissions, which provide a great opportunity for investigating strong-field molecules interaction in complicated environments, especially remote sensing. Additionally, the ultrastrong intensity inside the filament can damage almost all the detectors and ignite various intricate higher order nonlinear optical effects. These extreme physical conditions and complicated phenomena make the sensing and controlling of filamentation challenging. This paper mainly focuses on recent research advances in sensing with femtosecond laser filamentation, including fundamental physics, sensing and manipulating methods, typical filament-based sensing techniques and application scenarios, opportunities, and challenges toward the filament-based remote sensing under different complicated conditions.

We present a terahertz (THz) amplitude modulation method with near perfect E-field amplitude modulation depths that is based on impedance matching in VO₂ thin films during the thermally induced insulator-metal transition (IMT). It was observed that the impedance matching-induced THz amplitude modulation was sensitive to the resistance switching characteristics of the VO₂ thin films. By designing the VO₂ thin films to have four orders of magnitude of change in resistance during the IMT, we experimentally achieved an E-field amplitude modulation depth of 94.5% (intensity modulation depth of 99.7%) between the insulator phase of VO₂ and the impedance matching state, and an E-field amplitude modulation depth of 97.6% (intensity modulation depth of 99.94%) between the impedance matching state and the metallic phase of VO₂ at 0.5 THz. The experimental results were consistent with the results of simulations based on the transmission matrix model.