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## Meet the editors

Yahya Moubarak Meziani received his Ph.D. in 2001 from Montpellier 2 University, France. He worked there as a research assistant and teaching assistant from 2001 to 2005. He was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) post-doc fellow in 2005–2006 and an assistant professor for the Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, Japan, in 2006–2008. In 2008, he was awarded the Spanish

Ramón y Cajal tenure track at Salamanca University, Spain. Since 2013, he has been an associate professor at Salamanca University. He has authored more than 70 papers and 3 book chapters and participated in more than 100 international conferences. He is co-editor of the journal Electronics and was granted 30 competitive projects as IP and a member of the investigation team. His interests include terahertz technology, imaging and inspection, sensors, field effect transistors, and plasmonic rectification.

Jesús Enrique Velázquez-Pérez obtained his Ph.D. from the Universidad de Salamanca (USAL), Spain, and the Institute of Fundamental Electronics, University of ParisXI, Orsay, France, in 1990 with his work on the simulation of high-speed devices using models based on the Monte Carlo (MC) technique. In 1990, he joined the faculty of USAL as a Professor of Electronics. At that time, his research focused on Radiofrequency and

noise modeling of heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs). From 1998 to 2004, he was an invited researcher at the Imperial College London, UK, developing n-channel Si/SiGe MODFETs technology for low-power RF and millimeter-wave applications. This work led to strained-Si MODFETs and, later, to graphene field-effect transistor (FET) plasma-wave-based THz detectors. He has coauthored about 100 papers and more than 150 communications to international conferences.

### Contents


Preface

Most of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum has been extensively studied and used in countless industrial applications in communications, microscopy, spectroscopy and material analysis, medicine, and so on. Nevertheless, until a short time ago, the portion of the EM spectrum ranging from 100 GHz (3 mm) to 10 THz (30 µm), commonly known as the Terahertz (THz) region, has remained elusive for experimental science. The THz region of the electromagnetic spectrum is the least explored, the least well-known, and the last to be put to commercial use. The first measurements in the THz region were carried out by Heinrich Rubens in 1900 who measured the emission spectrum of the blackbody down to a few THz. His study played a key role in

Nevertheless, over the ensuing seven decades, the THz region received little attention. It was considered an "exotic" research field despite its recognized wide range of potential applications. It was only in the 1970s, once it was clearly demonstrated that most of the information about interstellar dust precisely lies in the THz portion of the EM spectrum, that research in THz was tackled vigorously. Since then, many telescopes have been designed and built to operate in the THz region around the world, especially in space-borne observatories. This has made available THz instrumentation that subsequently has enabled the progress of THz science in many research fields beyond astronomy. The interest in THz science also increased due to some unique properties of THz radiation, including imaging of concealed objects, spectroscopy (various rotational, vibrational, and translational modes of lightweight molecules are within the THz range, i.e., many substances have a THz fingerprint), communications with a bandwidth significantly larger than those based on microwaves, and more.

The past two decades have seen tremendous advances in the availability of THz sources and detectors that paved the way for commercial use, which in turn have fueled research in new applications of THz radiation. Some examples of new THz sources are Quantum Cascade Lasers (QCLs), photoconductors and photodiodes, nonlinear optical (NLO) materials excited by lasers, electronic sources, and oscillators. Similarly, new detectors based on solid-state devices such as Schottky-barrier diodes and bolometers, plasma waves in field-effect transistors, and others have been

This book includes six chapters summarizing the most recent progress and efforts in different research areas of THz science. It is organized into three sections: "Terahertz Time-Domain Spectroscopy," "2D Materials for Terahertz Technology," and "Biology

The first section, "Terahertz Time-Domain Spectroscopy", consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 "On-Chip Sub-Diffraction THz Spectroscopy of Materials and Liquids" by Randy M. Sterbentz and Joshua O. Island, focuses on the use of fast photoconductive switches to generate and detect on-chip THz pulses using a femtosecond laser to study

the formulation of the Max Plank blackbody radiation law.

demonstrated.

and Terahertz Radiation."
