A Theoretical and Experimental Research on Terahertz Electro-Optic Sampling at Near-Zero Optical Transmission Point

We report an improved theoretical model to characterize terahertz electro-optic (EO) sampling detection operating at near crossed-polarizer design by considering the nonzero minimal transmission of polarizers and the polarization purity of laser beam. The proof-of-concept experiments show that the model can give quiet reasonable explanations on many experimental phenomena in THz EO detection, e.g. the modulation depth vs the different optical biases, the noise level from the balance detector vs the input probe beam power, the main origin of the background light and the incomplete
cancellation of noise from the laser intensity fluctuation in balanced detection. The terahertz signals and the noises are also measured based on two different EO sampling schemes for comparison. The measured results support our model very well.