Neural-network reconstruction of THz transmission spectra using electrically tunable AlGaN/GaN plasmonic-crystal analyzer

Abstract

We demonstrate machine learning (ML) based reconstruction of terahertz transmission spectra using an electrically tunable grating-gate AlGaN/GaN plasmonic-crystal analyzer. The analyzer encodes the transmission spectrum into a voltage-dependent intensity, which is then inverted by an ML algorithm. A feedforward neural network trained on a synthetic dataset is validated experimentally on four samples in standard Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) mode and in direct (fixed-mirror) acquisition mode. The network achieves a mean square error (MSE) of the reconstruction of 0.015 in FTIR mode and 0.038 in direct mode, correctly identifying six out of seven ground-truth resonances in each mode. Against a first-difference Tikhonov regularization baseline, the mean reconstruction error is reduced 3.6 times in FTIR mode and 1.55 times in direct mode, with fewer spurious peaks and lower peak-position errors. Voltage-tunable plasmonic filtering combined with neural-network inversion establishes an interferometer-free architecture for THz spectral reconstruction.