Impulsive terahertz radiation with high electric fields from an amplifier-driven large-area photoconductive antenna

We report on the generation of impulsive terahertz (THz) radiation with 36 kV/cm vacuum electric field (1.5 mW average thermal power) at 250 kHz repetition rate and a high NIR-to-THz conversion efficiency of 2×10⁻³. This is achieved by photoexciting biased large-area photoconductive emitter with NIR fs pulses of μJ pulse energy. We demonstrate focussing of the THz beam by tailoring the pulse front of the exciting laser beam without any focussing element for the THz beam. A high dynamic range of 104 signal-to-noise is obtained with an amplifier based system.