Abstract

Pulsed THz (T-ray) spectroscopy is an increasingly common tool for studying materials from physics to biology. Liquid transmission T-ray studies are valuable for understanding solvation dynamics of salts, exploring long-range structure in mixtures and probing biomolecules in suspension. In this paper the uncertainty in parameter estimation of liquid samples is shown to be dependent on the thickness change of the sample, and on the noise of the T-ray spectrometer. For many important liquids, such as water, with high THz absorption, we show that measurement uncertainty can be greatly decreased using a dynamically-modulated liquid sample, using differential T-ray time-domain spectroscopy (DTDS). Preliminary experiments with a novel sample holder, based on a loud speaker, support these calculations. Amplitude and mean detection is used to simultaneously measure two waveforms in DTDS, potentially decreasing the noise by 102.