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

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.

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