Broadband Photon-Assisted Terahertz Communication and Sensing

Terahertz band (0.1 to 10 THz) with high carrier frequency and large available bandwidth has become a promising candidate to meet the 100 Gbit/s or even 1 Tbit/s data rate required by the future six-generation (6G) mobile communication networks. Compared with the all-electrical methods to generate terahertz signals, the photon-assisted technology can break the bottleneck of the bandwidth limit of the electronics devices, and generate the terahertz signal with high frequency, large bandwidth, flexible tunability and easy integration with the large capacity fiber link. In this paper, we introduce the typical methods to generate terahertz signals based on the photon-assisted technology, and review the representative achievements in different areas of terahertz communication, such as the large capacity terahertz transmission, the long distance terahertz transmission, the real-time terahertz communication, and the integrated terahertz sensing and communication. Based on the photon-assisted technology and various key techniques, devices and advanced digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms, we have obtained many great achievements in broadband terahertz communication and sensing, and the experimental setups and results have also been demonstrated in detail.