Terahertz Time-of-Flight Ranging with Adaptive Clock Asynchronous Optical Sampling

We propose and implement a terahertz time-of-flight ranging system based on adaptive clock asynchronous optical sampling, where the timing jitter is corrected in real time to recover the depth information in the acquired interferograms after compensating for laser instabilities using electronic signal processing. Consequently, the involved measurement uncertainties caused by the timing jitter during the terahertz sampling process and the noise intensity of the terahertz electric field have been reduced by the utilization of the adaptive clock. The achieved uncertainty range is about 2.5 μm at a 5 cm distance after averaging the acquisition time of 1876 ms 5000 times, showing a significant improvement compared with the asynchronous optical sampling using a constant clock. The implemented terahertz ranging system only uses free-running mode-locked lasers without any phase-locked electronics, and this favors simple and robust operations for subsequent applications that extend beyond the laboratory conditions.