MIT develops new terahertz laser for chemical sensing and imaging

New high powered laser selected by NASA for a 2021 mission to learn about our galaxy's origins

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts institute of technology has developed a new Terahertz laser for chemical sensing and imaging.

The new high powered laser has been selected by NASA for a 2021 mission to learn about our galaxy's origins. NASA will send a high altitude balloon-based telescope to detect the emissions of gasses from the ‘interstellar medium' the matter that exists in between the galaxy's star systems.

The information gathered will give scientists insight into the birth and evolution of stars and help map the nearby galaxies.

Terahertz lasers can send radiation into a material to extract the material's 'spectral fingerprint'. Each material absorbs different amounts of terahertz radiation, making it possible to measure how much is absorbed and how much is given off, to determine what the material is.

According to NASA many other designs have had these key features; continuous wave power/high beam quality and frequency tuning. But none have had all three and been integrated in this way.

Ali Khalatpour, the first author of the paper describing the laser, stated: "it's like ‘one ring to rule them all,"

The paper was co-written by Qing Hu, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT who has helped pioneer terahertz quantum lasers, and John L. Reno of the Sadina National Laboratories.

The laser has a unique design which uses pairs of efficient wire lasers and syncs their oscillations.

Combining the output of the pairs produces a high power beam with minimum beam divergence (the angle the beam strays from its focus over distance). The individual coupled lasers can be tuned to improve resolution and fidelity in the measurements.