Terahertz imaging of a vortex beam generated from a printed vortex phase plate

Printable electronics is a new advanced manufacturing technology, which allows a low-cost and simple fabrication of optical devices. The production consists of three main steps: choosing the materials, printing, and sintering. At first, a metallic ink and a substrate must be chosen. The second step is a printing which could be realized even with a common printer from our home or office. In the last step, the sintering should be applied to make a conductive structure from a printed trace. We use an ink-jet printer to create an optical device in the form of a vortex phase plate (VPP). It is able to generate a vortex beam, such a tornado. This beam has a lot of potential applications for many fields, such as biomedical, optical tweezers for manipulation of particles, a high-resolution microscopy, and telecommunications. We designed and printed a set of VPPs and changed the conductivities by varying the parameters of the sintering. To analyze the strength of the vortex beam as a function of the printed ink conductivity, we have used a terahertz spectroscopy. This is a powerful well-known non-contact, non-destructive and highresolved technique to characterize the properties of materials. To be cont’d.

Faculty Supervisor:

François Blanchard

Student:

Partner:

Kyoto University

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Education

University:

École de technologie supérieure

Program: