High Power Room Temperature Terahertz Local Oscillator

The motivation of the proposed SBIR is to develop, demonstrate and commercialize a compact, low-mass, high output power (1-10 milliwatt), tunable source of CW THz radiation operating at room temperature. The source will be useful both as a narrow band frequency stable sources for driving heterodyne receivers at key frequencies between 1 and 5 THz (1.4, 1.9, 2.7, 4.7 etc..) or for laboratory sources to characterize THz components, including MMIC's, or possibly for active spectrometers in an in-situ environment The proposed source would enable the development of THz array receivers for use in space and suborbital missions, or for atmospheric sounders and planetary landers. In Phase 1 our VECSEL THz source, based on intra-cavity difference frequency generation, demonstrated 2mW at 1.9THz running on a finite number of cavity modes with a linewidth per mode of around 1MHz. Desert Beam Technologies will team up TeraVision (Tucson) and with researchers at the Steward Observatory Radio Astronomy Laboratory (SORAL), University of Arizona in Phase 2 to further characterize a breadboard VECSEL 1.9THz system, measure Y-factor and I-V curves, redesign the VECSEL cavity to reduce it to single mode operation and test it as a local oscillator for SORAL's 1.9THz receiver.