Improvements in terahertz imaging using plasmonic spatial beam modulators

There has been a lot of interest in developing high-performance terahertz imaging systems which have valuable applications in surveillance, security screening, medical tomography and nondestructive inspection of various pharmaceutical, agricultural, and industrial products [1, 2]. Conventional terahertz imaging systems based on mechanical scanning of the imaging beam, object or the detector suffer from significantly low acquisition speeds [3–5]. Additionally, realtime terahertz imaging systems based on two dimensional arrays of THz sources and detectors tend to have lower sensitivity, higher complexity and higher operational cost [6–8].