Abstract

Diffraction of free-space traveling Terahertz pulses usually results in complex changes of the pulse waveform. In near-field microscopy a pulse passes through an aperture of subwavelength size, which in general distorts the pulse waveform depending on the aperture size, pulse bandwidth, frequency chirp, as well as distance to the sample [1,2,3]. The effects of the aperture are therefore essential in the data analysis. We experimentally demonstrate that pulse waveform deformation in diffraction on apertures can be reduced to simple spectral amplitude and phase changes if the aperture size is much smaller than the wavelength.

© 2002 Optical Society of America