Achievement

The interdisciplinary approach that IGERT promotes has led to the development of a portable, handheld, battery-operated terahertz spectrometer. Through the work of one current (David Brigada) and one former IGERT trainee (Brian Schulkin, 2007 Lemelson-Rensselaer Prize winner), a fully-integrated system has been developed, consisting of terahertz optics, detection electronics, and an onboard computer for data analysis and a user interface. This THz spectrometer is the smallest THz time-domain spectrometer in the world. It is a truly handheld unit, with battery operation time up to 12 hours. These units will be used for environmental monitoring and homeland security applications.