paper appearing today in the journal Nature<\/a>, the scientists report that they have developed a new terahertz microscope that compresses terahertz light down to microscopic dimensions. This pinpoint of terahertz light can resolve quantum details in materials that were previously inaccessible.<\/p>\nThe team used the new microscope to send terahertz light into a sample of\u00a0bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide, or BSCCO (pronounced \u201cBIS-co\u201d) \u2014 a\u00a0material that superconducts at relatively high temperatures. With the terahertz scope, the team observed a frictionless \u201csuperfluid\u201d of superconducting electrons that were collectively jiggling back and forth at terahertz frequencies within the BSCCO material.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis new microscope now allows us to see a new mode of superconducting electrons that nobody has ever seen before,\u201d says Nuh Gedik, the Donner Professor of Physics at MIT.<\/p>\n
By using terahertz light to probe BSCCO and other superconductors, scientists can gain a better understanding of properties that could lead to long-coveted room-temperature superconductors. The new microscope can also help to identify materials that emit and receive terahertz radiation. Such materials could be the foundation of future wireless, terahertz-based communications, that could potentially transmit more data at faster rates compared to today\u2019s microwave-based communications.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a huge push to take Wi-Fi or telecommunications to the next level, to terahertz frequencies,\u201d says Alexander von Hoegen, a postdoc in MIT\u2019s Materials Research Laboratory and lead author of the study. \u201cIf you have a terahertz microscope, you could study how terahertz light interacts with microscopically small devices that could serve as future antennas or receivers.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to Gedik and von Hoegen, the study\u2019s MIT co-authors include Tommy Tai, Clifford Allington, Matthew Yeung, Jacob Pettine, Alexander Kossak, Byunghun Lee, and Geoffrey Beach, along with collaborators at Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and the Brookhaven National Lab.<\/p>\n
Hitting a limit<\/strong><\/p>\nTerahertz light is a promising yet largely untapped imaging tool. It occupies a unique spectral \u201csweet spot\u201d: Like microwaves, radio waves, and visible light, terahertz radiation is nonionizing and therefore does not carry enough energy to cause harmful radiation effects, making it safe for use in humans and biological tissues. At the same time, much like X-rays, terahertz waves can penetrate a wide range of materials, including fabric, wood, cardboard, plastic, ceramics, and even thin brick walls.<\/p>\n
Owing to these distinctive properties, terahertz light is being actively explored for applications in security screening, medical imaging, and wireless communications. In contrast, far less effort has been devoted to applying terahertz radiation to microscopy and the illumination of microscopic phenomena. The primary reason is a fundamental limitation shared by all forms of light: the diffraction limit, which restricts spatial resolution to roughly the wavelength of the radiation used.<\/p>\n
With wavelengths on the order of hundreds of microns, terahertz radiation is far larger than atoms, molecules, and many other microscopic structures. As a result, its ability to directly resolve microscale features is fundamentally constrained.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur main motivation is this problem that, you might have a 10-micron sample, but your terahertz light has a 100-micron wavelength, so what you would mostly be measuring is air, or the vacuum around your sample,\u201d von Hoegen explains. \u201cYou would be missing all these quantum phases that have characteristic fingerprints in the terahertz regime.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zooming in<\/strong><\/p>\nThe team found a way around the terahertz diffraction limit by using spintronic emitters \u2014 a recent technology that produces sharp pulses of terahertz light. Spintronic emitters are made from multiple ultrathin metallic layers. When a laser illuminates the multilayered structure, the light triggers a cascade of effects in the electrons within each layer, such that the structure ultimately emits a pulse of energy at terahertz frequencies.<\/p>\n
By holding a sample close to the emitter, the team trapped the terahertz light before it had a chance to spread, essentially squeezing it into a space much smaller than its wavelength. In this regime, the light can bypass the diffraction limit to resolve features that were previously too small to see.<\/p>\n
The MIT team adapted this technology to observe microscopic, quantum-scale phenomena. For their new study, the team developed a terahertz microscope using spintronic emitters interfaced with a Bragg mirror. This multilayered structure of reflective films successively filters out certain, undesired wavelengths of light while letting through others, protecting the sample from the \u201charmful\u201d laser which triggers the terahertz emission.<\/p>\n
As a demonstration, the team used the new microscope to image a small, atomically thin sample of BSCCO. They placed the sample very close to the terahertz source and imaged it at temperatures close to absolute zero \u2014 cold enough for the material to become a superconductor. To create the image, they scanned the laser beam, sending terahertz light through the sample and looking for the specific signatures left by the superconducting electrons.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see the terahertz field gets dramatically distorted, with little oscillations following the main pulse,\u201d von Hoegen says. \u201cThat tells us that something in the sample is emitting terahertz light, after it got kicked by our initial terahertz pulse.\u201d<\/p>\n
With further analysis, the team concluded that the terahertz microscope was observing the natural, collective terahertz oscillations of superconducting electrons within the material.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s this superconducting gel that we\u2019re sort of seeing jiggle,\u201d von Hoegen says.<\/p>\n
This jiggling superfluid was expected, but never directly visualized until now. The team is now applying the microscope to other two-dimensional materials, where they hope to capture more terahertz phenomena.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a lot of the fundamental excitations, like lattice vibrations and magnetic processes, and all these collective modes that happen at terahertz frequencies,\u201d von Hoegen says. \u201cWe can now resonantly zoom in on these interesting physics with our terahertz microscope.\u201d<\/p>\n
This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Fabrication was carried out with the use of MIT.nano.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You can tell a lot about a material based on the type of light you shine at it:…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":570253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[25],"tags":[248072,48357,248071,492,159,97305,117430,141816,247975,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-570252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-alexander-von-hoegen","tag-mit-physics","tag-nuh-gedik","tag-physics","tag-science","tag-superconductivity","tag-superfluid","tag-terahertz-light","tag-terahertz-microscope","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116023162699602021","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/570253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=570252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=570252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}