Non-destructive evaluation and fast conductivity calculation of various nanowire-based thin films with artificial neural network aided THz time-domain spectroscopy

Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) has been utilized extensively to characterize materials in a non-destructive way. However, when materials are characterized with THz-TDS, there are many extensive steps for analyzing the acquired terahertz signals to extract the material information. In this work, we present a significantly effective, steady, and rapid solution to obtain the conductivity of nanowire-based conducting thin films by utilizing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques with THz-TDS to minimize the analyzing steps by training neural networks with time domain waveform as an input data instead of a frequency domain spectrum. For this purpose, Al-doped and undoped ZnO nanowires (NWs) on sapphire substrates and silver nanowires (AgNWs) on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyimide (PI) substrates have been measured for dataset creation via THz-TDS. After training and testing a shallow neural network (SSN) and a deep neural network (DNN) to obtain the optimum model, we calculated conductivity in a conventional way, and the prediction based on our models matched successfully. This study revealed that users could determine a sample's conductivity without fast Fourier transform and conventional conductivity calculation steps within seconds after obtaining its THz-TDS waveform, demonstrating that AI techniques have great potential in terahertz technology. (c) 2023 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement