Structured Materials Industries, Inc. (SMI) announced today that it has received Phase I SBIR funding from the NIST to develop a tunable CW THz source. THz radiation is of great current interest for imaging applications, with great promise for spectroscopy, medical imaging, defense imaging and homeland security applications. However, the lack of sufficiently powerful, compact sources has so far drastically limited the development in these fields. In this SBIR program SMI will develop and demonstrate a tunable CW THz source having high efficiency and high power, utilizing a novel design. Detailed modeling indicates an improvement of several orders of magnitude in power conversion efficiency over current state-of-the-art designs. In the program, Structured Materials Industries (SMI) will team with the University of Wisconsin to design and fabricate the new source, based on our jointly developed LiNbO3 deposition, processing technology and proprietary designs. With their high sensitivity and selectivity, THz systems can be used to monitor public facilities and high-occupancy buildings for toxic industrial chemicals, chemical agents, and trace explosives in a continuous and autonomous manner. These systems can also be used for wide-area monitoring of toxic chemicals in open air. Because of better penetration in materials than optics, they can also be used for detection and imaging of weapons concealed under clothing. Furthermore, the wavelengths in the THz range appear to resonate with biological macromolecular structures and DNA strands in a unique manner. These systems, because of their inherently fast response, can be used as “detect to protect” sensors for early detection and warning of bio-aerosols such as spores, bacteria, viruses, and pathogens. The major impediment to utilization of THz for these applications is the lack of convenient and powerful sources as well as sensitive detectors. Thus we expect that as we develop such sources in this program, there will be a rapidly growing market for the THz products and the tools that make the THz films.