Giant enhancement of terahertz emission from nanoporous GaP

In this paper, we have studied the emission of terahertz radiation from nanoporous semiconductor matrices of GaP excited by the femtosecond laser pulses. We observe 3–4 orders of magnitude increase of terahertz radiation emission from the nanoporous matrix compared to bulk material. The effect is mainly related to drastic increase of the sample surface and pinning of conducting electrons to surface states. This result opens up a promising way to create powerful sources of terahertz radiation using nanoporous semiconductors.