The photo-Dember effect is a source of impulsive THz emission following femtosecond pulsed optical excitation. This emission results from the ultrafast spatial separation of electron-hole pairs in strong carrier gradients due to their different diffusion coefficients. The associated time dependent polarization is oriented perpendicular to the excited surface which is inaptly for efficient out coupling of THz radiation. We propose a scheme for generating strong carrier gradients parallel to the excited surface. The resulting photo-Dember currents are oriented in the same direction and emit THz radiation into the favorable direction perpendicular to the surface. This effect is demonstrated for GaAs and In(0.53)Ga(0.47)As. Surprisingly the photo-Dember THz emitters provide higher bandwidth than photoconductive emitters. Multiplexing of phase coherent photo-Dember currents by periodically tailoring the photoexcited spatial carrier distribution gives rise to a strongly enhanced THz emission, which reaches electric field amplitudes comparable to a high-efficiency externally biased photoconductive emitter.

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We present the experimental realization of different approaches to increase the amount of quantized current which is driven by surface acoustic waves through split gate structures in a two dimensional electron gas. Samples with driving frequencies of up to 4.7 GHz have been fabricated without a deterioration of the precision of the current steps, and a parallelization of two channels with correspondingly doubled current values have been achieved. We discuss theoretical and technological limitations of these approaches for metrological applications as well as for quantum logics.Comment: 3pages, 4eps-figure

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We use projection screens filled with colloidal dispersions to reduce laser speckle in laser projection systems. Laser light is multiply scattered at the globules of the colloidal dispersion's internal phase, which do Brownian movement. The integration time of the human eye causes a perception of a reduced laser speckle contrast because of temporal averaging. As a counteracting effect, blurring of projected images occurs in the colloidal dispersion, which degrades image quality. We measure and compare speckle reduction and blurring of three different colloidal dispersions filled into transmission screens of different thicknesses. We realized a high speckle contrast reduction at simultaneously low blurring with a thin screen filled with a highly scattering colloidal dispersion with forward-peaked scattering. We realize speckle contrast values below 3% at acceptable blurring.