High Average Power Lasers at THz

Ultrafast laser-driven terahertz sources are gaining in popularity in an increasingly wide range of scientific and technological applications. However, many fields continue to be severely limited by the typically low average power of these sources, which restricts speed, signal-to-noise ratio, and dynamic range in numerous measurements. Conversely, the past two decades have seen spectacular progress in high-average-power ultrafast laser technology based on Ytterbium lasers, rendering hundreds of watts to kilowatts of average power available to this community to drive THz sources. This has opened the young field of high-average-power laser-driven THz time-domain spectroscopy, which promises to revolutionize many of the application fields of Terahertz light. We discuss this young field and emphasize recent advancements in broadband terahertz sources utilizing high-power ultrafast lasers as drivers, which are nearing watt-level average power. We discuss advances in high-power ultrafast laser architectures and various approaches explored thus far to apply them for generating THz pulses, current challenges, prospects for further scaling, and the new opportunities these sources may open in the future.

About the Speaker

Clara Saraceno was born in 1983 in Argentina.  In 2007, she completed a Diploma in Engineering and an MSc at the Institut d’Optique Graduate School, Paris. After finishing her studies, she was an Engineering Trainee at Coherent, Santa Clara, CA, from 2007 to 2008. She completed a PhD in Physics at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, in 2012 in the group of Prof. Ursula Keller, where she carried out research on ultrafast disk lasers. She received the ETH Medal for her PhD thesis and the European Physical Society (Quantum Electronics and Optics Division) thesis prize in applied aspects in 2013.  From 2013 to 2016, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Neuchâtel and ETH Zürich.

In 2016, she received a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and became Associate Professor of Photonics and Ultrafast Science in the Electrical Engineering Faculty at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. In 2018, she received an ERC Starting Grant, and in 2024, an ERC Consolidator Grant. She is a Fellow of Optica in the class of 2022.

Since 2020, she has been a full professor at the Ruhr University in Bochum, and the current main research topics of her group include high-power ultrafast lasers and Terahertz science and technology. Her group also houses a spin-off, ‘Rayven’, that aims to commercialize novel 2.1µm ultrafast laser technology.