Determination of the time origin by the maximum entropy method in time-domain terahertz emission spectroscopy

We have developed a scheme for determining the time origin by the maximum entropy method (MEM) in time-domain terahertz (THz) emission spectroscopy. By applying the MEM to trial damped sinusoidal waveforms, we confirmed that the MEM gives true phase shifts across the resonance features and that its inherent uncertainty in determining the time origin is +/- 15 fs for 100-fs-class excitation/sampling optical pulses. Furthermore, when the MEM was applied to a THz waveform recorded experimentally with a finite sampling interval for the Bloch oscillation in a semiconductor superlattice, a misplacement of the time origin was indeed detected with an accuracy limited by the worse of the MEM inherent uncertainty and the sampling interval. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America