Self-Supervised Noise2Noise-Enhanced Denoising for Continuous-Scan Air-Plasma THz Spectroscopy

Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) based on air-plasma generation and balanced air-biased coherent detection offers gap-free broadband coverage, but individual continuous-scan traces are strongly affected by pulse-to-pulse fluctuations and electronic noise. Reaching a useful signal-to-noise ratio therefore requires averaging multiple traces, which directly increases measurement time. We propose a learned denoising approach that recovers high-quality THz waveforms from as few as one complete continuous delay sweep, referred to here as a single-scan trace. A compact one-dimensional residual U-Net is trained using two complementary strategies: a reference-supervised baseline that maps individual noisy traces to long-average reference waveforms, and a Noise2Noise approach that learns from pairs of independently acquired noisy traces without requiring a clean training target. Averaging the predictions of both models reduces systematic bias and yields a trace-reduction factor of approximately 5.4× at K=1, meaning that one denoised trace achieves the reconstruction accuracy of averaging approximately five raw traces. The Noise2Noise model alone achieves 4.9×, outperforming both the reference-supervised baseline (4.6×) and classical Wiener filtering (3.2×). These results show that self-supervised learning from repeated noisy measurements can support faster continuous-scan THz-TDS without hardware modification.