Terahertz (THz) imaging is promising for nondestructive evaluation, since many optically opaque dielectrics are
transparent to THz waves. Conventional THz imaging systems employ focusing elements such as spherical lenses and
off-axis parabolas, but their fixed focal length produces an inherent trade-off between lateral resolution and depth of
focus. Furthermore, image quality suffers when imaging objects located inside a dielectric medium. The air-dielectric
interface introduces significant spherical aberration that degrades spatial resolution. Bessel beams are known to produce
a small spot size over a large depth of focus. The contribution of our work is two-fold: (1) We demonstrate THz imaging
with a significantly improved depth of focus using a zero-th order Bessel beam produced by an axicon lens. (2) We also
demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, that Bessel beams experience reduced spherical aberration when
imaging objects embedded in a dielectric medium. Imaging experiments are performed with a time-domain THz system,
where a zero-th order quasi-Bessel beam is formed with an axicon lens made from high density polyethylene (HDPE).
The HDPE axicon has a 50 mm diameter and an apex angle of 120 degrees. Point spread function (PSF) measurements
confirm that lateral resolution is maintained over a 25 mm depth of field in air. The same lateral resolution is achieved
over a 35 mm range inside a HDPE substrate. Needle objects embedded inside a thick HDPE substrate are imaged with
high spatial resolution. Image contrast is significantly improved by digital filtering to reduce sidelobe levels. These
promising results suggest that Bessel beams are well suited for terahertz nondestructive imaging of thick dielectric
objects.
Sparse arrays are highly attractive for implementing two-dimensional arrays, but come at the cost of degraded image
quality. We demonstrate significantly improved performance by exploiting the coherent ultrawideband nature of singlecycle
THz pulses. We compute two weighting factors to each time-delayed signal before final summation to form the
reconstructed image. The first factor employs cross-correlation analysis to measure the degree of walk-off between timedelayed
signals of neighboring elements. The second factor measures the spatial coherence of the time-delayed delayed
signals. Synthetic aperture imaging experiments are performed with a THz time-domain system employing a
mechanically scanned single transceiver element. Cross-sectional imaging of wire targets is performed with a onedimensional
sparse array with an inter-element spacing of 1.36 mm (over four λ at 1 THz). The proposed image
reconstruction technique improves image contrast by 15 dB, which is impressive considering the relatively few elements
in the array. En-face imaging of a razor blade is also demonstrated with a 56 x 56 element two-dimensional array,
showing reduced image artifacts with adaptive reconstruction. These encouraging results suggest that the proposed
image reconstruction technique can be highly beneficial to the development of large area two-dimensional THz arrays.
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