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Terahertz (THz) wave plays important roles in the research of material properties, the non-invasive human security check and the next generation wireless communication. The progress of the scientific and technological applications of THz wave is strongly dependent on the improvement of THz detectors. Here a novel THz wave detection scheme is proposed in which the THz radiation is detected by an audible microphone based on the photo-thermo-acoustic (PTA) effect in graphene foam. Thanks to the room-temperature broadband electromagnetic absorption characteristics of graphene foam and the fast heat transfer between graphene foam and ambient air, this detection method not only inherits the advantages of the photo-thermal THz detector such as room-temperature and full bandwidth, but also has a response time 3 orders of magnitude faster than the photo-thermal detector. Besides, no micro-antenna/electrode is required to fabricate in the graphene foam THz detector which greatly simplifies the detector design and decreases the fabrication cost. It concludes that the room-temperature, full-bandwidth, fast-speed (≥10 kHz), and easy-to-fabricate THz detector developed in this work has superior comprehensive performances among both the commercial THz detectors and the detectors recently developed in laboratory.

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Laser-induced periodic surface structure (LIPSS) is an important, high-throughput surface nano-structuring method, which has been used to fabricate various functional surfaces. In this paper, we fabricate double time-delayed orthogonally polarized femtosecond laser beams with a fixed beam power ratio of 1.5:1 that are employed to irradiate the silicon surface and curved periodic ripples with a sub-wavelength period. It is found that the local orientation of the ripples on the silicon surface can be modulated in a range of 0-80° by adjusting the fabrication parameters, such as the laser fluence, the target scanning speed, and the time delay between double laser beams. The transition from the curved ripples to the straight ripples can be achieved by increasing the target scanning speed. Different from previous studies that the curved periodic ripples are fabricated by modulating the laser polarization, the method demonstrated here utilizes the interaction between the linearly polarized subsequent laser beam and the preceding laser beam excited silicon to form curved ripples.

Non-cylindrical vectorial femtosecond lasers are employed to irradiate tungsten surfaces. Compound nanopatterns composed of periodic nanoholes and semi-circular curved ripples are produced by scanning the target relative to the laser beam. The tangential direction of the curved ripples is perpendicular to the local polarization direction of the vectorial femtosecond laser beam. Therefore, the formation mechanism of the curved ripples can be attributed to the interference between the incident femtosecond laser and the laser-induced surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). We found that, in addition to the curved ripples, periodic nanoholes with an average diameter of 406 nm also appeared on the target surface, and they all tended to appear at the vertexes of the semi-circular curved ripples, i.e., the converging point of SPPs. Further experiments demonstrated that the location of the periodic nanoholes was totally determined by the polarization state of the incident femtosecond laser. Therefore, we deduced that the convergent SPPs induced by the non-cylindrical vectorial femtosecond laser interfered with the incident laser at the convergent point, leading to the generation of periodic nanoholes. The investigations in this work exhibited the important role of manipulating the propagation of SPPs in femtosecond laser surface structuring, which not only diversifies the surface patterns that can be produced by laser-induced periodic surface structuring (LIPSS) but also provides deep insights in the excitation and propagation dynamics of SPPs.