Transmittance investigation on capacitive mesh on thick dielectric substrates as output windows for optically pumped terahertz lasers

This paper reports that an output window for optically pumped terahertz (THz) laser has been fabricated by depositing a capacitive nickel-mesh on a thick high-resistivity silicon substrate (approximating to 5 mm thick). Unlike the conventional process of depositing a gold film approximating to 100 nm on negative photoresist using electron-beam evaporation, a nickel film approximating to 1.5 μm thick is directly deposited on the clean surface of dielectric substrate using magnetron sputtering and then a positive photoresist is spun onto the nickel metal surface at 6000 r for 60 s. A transmittance spectrum of the output window in a certain frequency range (say, from zero to 1 THz) has been obtained by using THz time domain spectroscopy. Moreover a transmittance spectrum simulated numerically has also been estimated with respect to the output window using the transmission-line model (TLM) containing attenuation component from dielectric substrate. The simulation results show that the TLM can explain well the experimental curve in a certain frequency range from zero to 1 THz. Thus it is demonstrated that the improved optical component can be efficiently used as both output coupler and output window for optically pumped THz lasers.