Using a fiber stretcher as a fast phase modulator in a continuous wave terahertz spectrometer

Continuous wave terahertz spectroscopy based on photomixing offers the attractive feature of detecting both amplitude and phase of the terahertz radiation. Experimentally, it is challenging to achieve sufficient accuracy at a high data acquisition rate. We use two fiber stretchers as fast phase modulators in a symmetric setup. Compared to a mechanical delay stage, the fiber stretchers are rather fast (approximate to 1 kHz), which enables us to record a spectrum up to 1.8 THz with a step size of 1 GHz in only 10 min. We achieve a stability of the optical path difference of around 10 mu m and use low-doped Si as an example to demonstrate the performance of our spectrometer. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America