Characterization of photoconducting materials using variable length picosecond terahertz pulses

A source of high-intensity, ultra-short terahertz pulses has been developed. The operation and performance of a terahertz pulse-slicing system for use with the UCSB free-electron lasers are discussed. Short pulses are sliced from the microsecond long output of the free-electron laser using laser-activated semiconductor switches; the pulse length may be freely varied from a few picoseconds up to four nanoseconds. The temporal response of a heavily compensated gallium-doped germanium photoconductor has been investigated. At low excitation intensity, a recombination time of 2 +/- 0.1 ns is found. At higher THz pulse powers non-exponential relaxation is observed; the data is well modelled using a rate equation approach and including impact-ionisation effects due to the terahertz-heated free holes.