Engineers demonstrate first room-temperature semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz radiation

A photograph of a bar with 10 terahertz laser sources developed by the Harvard University engineers. One of the lasers is connected to the contact pad (seen on the left) by two thin gold wires. A 2mm-diameter Silicon hyper-hemispherical lens is attached to the facet of the device to collimate the terahertz output. The emission frequency is 5 THz, corresponding to a wavelength of 60 microns. Credit: Courtesy of the Capasso Lab, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences