Terahertz Pioneers - A Series of Interviews With Significant Contributors to Terahertz Science and Technology

Abstract

This month's article exemplifies the broad scope of applications that are touched by far-infrared techniques. It was extremely difficult to fit the eight scientific lives of Fritz Keilmann into the eight allocated pages of text that follow, but the author has tried to do so without detracting from the broad swath of scientific problems that this wunderkind has tackled. With a career that began in meteorology, and migrated through plasma physics, nonlinear optics and optically pumped lasers, nearand far-infrared spectroscopy, biophysics, quantum Hall effects, near-field microscopy, and now biomedical nanoscopy, it is difficult to settle on a specific set of contributions that accurately reflect the total of Keilmann's professional accomplishments. Although the THz community has perhaps benefited most from his invention of scattering-type scanning near-field infrared microscopy (s-SNOM) and his nanoscale Fourier Transform Infrared (nano-FTIR) spectroscopy techniques, his work on optically pumped lasers, high power handling metal mesh filters, RF biological effects and pulsed time domain dual frequency-comb spectrometers, will most certainly cross over into future THz techniques and applications.

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