Terahertz Metamaterials for Linear Polarization Conversion and Anomalous Refraction

By N. Grady, J. Heyes, D. R. Chowdhury, Yong Zeng, M. Reiten, Abul Kalam Azad, A. Taylor, D. Dalvit, Houtong Chen. Science, 2013

1,797 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Converting Polarization The conversion of a light signal from one polarization direction to another plays an important role in communication and metrology. The components that are presently used for polarization conversion, however, tend to be relatively large, which is an issue that can make it difficult to integrate with chip-scale optoelectronic circuits. Grady et al. (p. 1304, published online 16 May) used a metasurfaces approach involving a designed array of cut wires to manipulate the polarization state of the propagating terahertz signals. Proper design of the device structure allowed for the control of the polarization conversion state for both reflected and transmitted light over a broad frequency range. A metasurface-based design is used for polarization conversion in the terahertz regime. Polarization is one of the basic properties of electromagnetic waves conveying valuable information in signal transmission and sensitive measurements. Conventional methods for advanced polarization control impose demanding requirements on material properties and attain only limited performance. We demonstrated ultrathin, broadband, and highly efficient metamaterial-based terahertz polarization converters that are capable of rotating a linear polarization state into its orthogonal one. On the basis of these results, we created metamaterial structures capable of realizing near-perfect anomalous refraction. Our work opens new opportunities for creating high-performance photonic devices and enables emergent metamaterial functionalities for applications in the technologically difficult terahertz-frequency regime.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61ef3736b129a9c24c17d95a826252c958404390

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Houtong Chen
2. Lingling Huang
3. Fei Ding
4. Shuang Zhang
5. N. Yu
6. T. Zentgraf
7. A. Taylor
8. Sergey I. Bozhevolnyi

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. N. Yu
2. Houtong Chen
3. T. Cui
4. A. Taylor
5. Shenheng Xu
6. Fei Ding
7. Fan Yang
8. Shuxi Gong

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. N. Yu
2. T. Cui
3. Houtong Chen
4. Sergei A. Tretyakov
5. Sergey I. Bozhevolnyi
6. Lei Zhou
7. Qiong He
8. A. Taylor

Citations in the corpus

• Wideband RCS Reduction of a Slot Array Antenna Using Polarization Conversion Metasurfaces (2016, methodology): “[15] demonstrated that metamaterials for linear polarization conversion were suitable for terahertz applications; and the double-arrow structure was used to implement an ultrawide band polarization conversion metasurfaces (PCMs) [13].”
• Versatile Polarization Generation and Manipulation Using Dielectric Metasurfaces (2020, background): “However, these metasurface-based polarization converters are always designed to perform a single functionality; in case of a half-wave plate (HWP), it can only yield linear-tolinear (or circular-to-circular) polarization transformation for plane wave (7-9).”
• Metasurface holography: from fundamentals to applications (2018, background): “The disadvantage of such plasmonic metasurfaces is the low efficiency in transmission, but such a limitation can be conquered by applying metal-insulator-metal schemes working in a reflection configuration, or a more complicated multilayer design [47].”
• Perfect control of reflection and refraction using spatially dispersive metasurfaces (2016, methodology): “[10] N.”
• Dual-Mode Transmissive Metasurface and Its Applications in Multibeam Transmitarray (2017, background): “Notwithstanding the success of metasurfaces in advancing both theoretical and applied physics [16]–[18], devising a metasurface with a high transmission rate and thus a high efficiency remains challenging.”
• Physical Explanation of Fabry–Pérot Cavity for Broadband Bilayer Metamaterials Polarization Converter (2018, background): “Usually, polarization converters designed in reflection mode can achieve more excellent performance than that in transmission mode [27].”