Abstract
We investigate the characteristics of terahertz radiation pulses using biased multi-energy arsenic-ion-implanted and semi-insulating GaAs photoconductive antennas with different gap sizes in terahertz time-domain spectroscopy. At a specific fluence excitation, with increasing antenna gap size, the absolute values of the (peak) normalized terahertz waveform minimum (valley), as well as the bandwidth, reveal an increasing trend for multi-energy arsenic-ion-implanted GaAs antennas and a decreasing trend for semi-insulating GaAs antennas. We find that the largest reachable bias fields applied to arsenic-ion-implanted GaAs antennas are higher than those applied to semi-insulating GaAs antennas. On the basis of pump fluence dependences of peak terahertz amplitude, we deduce that multi-energy arsenic-ion-implanted GaAs antennas have the ability to acquire higher THz power at even higher pump fluence in comparison with semi-insulating GaAs antennas. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.