New Terahertz Detectors for Improved Airport Screening and Medical Imaging

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, Rice University, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology are developing new terahertz detectors based on carbon nanotubes that could lead to significant improvements in medical imaging, airport passenger screening, food inspection, and other applications. The detector features several nanoscopic-sized tubes, creating a macroscopic thin film that contains a mix of metallic and semiconducting carbon nanotubes. It detects light in the terahertz frequency range without cooling. Historically, the terahertz frequency range has presented great promise along with vexing challenges for researchers. In this video, Sandia researcher François Léonard explains the work.

Transcript

00:00:04 there is a very large challenge in the technology field in trying to realize terz detectors and uh with our collaborators at rice and the Tokyo Institute of Technology we've demonstrated for the first time that we can take advantage of the unique properties of carbon nit tubes these are really Exquisite nanomaterials to realize one of these terahertz

00:00:29 detectors carbon nanot tubes are these exciting materials which have a nanometer scale diameter and they can also be very very long and they're made entirely of carbon atoms which bind together very strongly so we can make all kinds of different electronic photonic type devices using this material so the terahertz spectrum is

00:00:54 unique in that the terahertz radiation can penetrate through materials and and this allows us to image different objects or structures that are embedded or hidden by certain Fabrics or certain materials Sandia obviously is a national security laboratory so we were motivated to do this work in part by the many applications of ter Herz technology for such applications it turns out that

00:01:29 there are other applications that can take advantage of this new technology for example medical imaging currently relies on doing magnetic resonance imaging which requires a very large system what would be a great Improvement on this technology would be to have an Imaging device that could be used directly in the operating room in real time likewise the ability to image

00:01:58 structures that are embedded in material can be taken advantage of to do food inspection where very often one would like to have a realtime diagnostic technique that can uh see if foreign objects have been embedded in the food that's being prepared on the production line this is only the first demonstration and we have some very clear paths both in terms of engineering

00:02:26 and in terms of improving the material performance that lead us to believe that we can significantly improve the performance of the detector we're also very interested in partnering with industry and government organizations to try and push this technology further