Abstract

Recently, there has been a surge in developing highly efficient, scalable, and compact THz sources with high pumping energy for research in particular in biology, medicine, or particle acceleration. Among various approaches, THz generation by optical rectification (OR) provides an effective and tabletop solution for THz pulses flexibly tailored to the mentioned needs. Up to now, high energy in the low frequency THz regime was reached in LN (1.4 mJ) [1], and in the DSTMS organic crystal (0.9 mJ) [2]. While the former suffers several significant limitations which reduce the efficiency below 1%, the latter has, as all organic nonlinear crystals do, a low damage threshold, hindering its practical use. ZnTe has already been proven to be an efficient source when the low-order multiphoton absorption is suppressed [3], and shows that semiconductors can potentially be good candidates for efficient, high-energy THz sources when pumped at longer wavelength.

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