A New Class of Electrically Tunable Metamaterial Terahertz Modulators

Abstract

Switchable metamaterials offer unique solutions for efficiently manipulating electromagnetic waves, particularly for terahertz waves, which has been difficult since naturally occurring materials rarely respond to terahertz frequencies controllably. However, few terahertz modulators demonstrated to date exhibit simultaneously low attenuation and high modulation depth. In this letter we propose a new class of electrically-tunable terahertz metamaterial modulators employing metallic frequency-selective-surfaces (FSS) in conjunction with capacitively-tunable layers of electrons, promising near 100% modulation depth and < 15% attenuation. The fundamental departure in our design from the prior art is tuning enabled by self-gated electron layers that is independent from the metallic FSS. Our proposal is applicable to all possible electrically tunable elements including graphene, Si, MoS2, oxides etc, thus opening up myriad opportunities for realizing high performance switchable metamaterials over an ultra-wide terahertz frequency range.

References in corpus (4)

• Measurement of the Optical Conductivity of Graphene
• Measurement of Scattering Rate and Minimum Conductivity in Graphene
• A comparison of graphene, superconductors and metals as conductors for metamaterials and plasmonics
• Transistors with Chemically Synthesized Layered Semiconductor WS2 Exhibiting 105 Room Temperature Modulation and Ambipolar Behavior

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Full-range Gate-controlled Terahertz Phase Modulations with Graphene Metasurfaces
• Graphene based functional devices: A short review
• Coherent control of light interaction with graphene
• Ultrahigh refractive index sensitivity of TE-polarized electromagnetic waves in graphene at the interface between two dielectric media