Electro-optical sampling of single-cycle THz fields with single-photon detectors

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Shields, Taylor and Dada, Adetunmise C. and Hirsch, Lennart and Yoon, Seungjin and Weaver, Jonathan M. R. and Faccio, Daniele and Caspani, Lucia and Peccianti, Marco and Clerici, Matteo (2022) Electro-optical sampling of single-cycle THz fields with single-photon detectors. Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 22 (23). 9432. ISSN 1424-8220 (https://doi.org/10.3390/s22239432)

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Abstract

Electro-optical sampling of Terahertz fields with ultrashort pulsed probes is a well-established approach for directly measuring the electric field of THz radiation. This technique usually relies on balanced detection to record the optical phase shift brought by THz-induced birefringence. The sensitivity of electro-optical sampling is, therefore, limited by the shot noise of the probe pulse, and improvements could be achieved using quantum metrology approaches using, e.g., NOON states for Heisenberg-limited phase estimation. We report on our experiments on THz electro-optical sampling using single-photon detectors and a weak squeezed vacuum field as the optical probe. Our approach achieves field sensitivity limited by the probe state statistical properties using phase-locked single-photon detectors and paves the way for further studies targeting quantum-enhanced THz sensing.

ORCID iDs

Shields, Taylor, Dada, Adetunmise C., Hirsch, Lennart, Yoon, Seungjin, Weaver, Jonathan M. R., Faccio, Daniele, Caspani, Lucia ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2711-0448, Peccianti, Marco and Clerici, Matteo;
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