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Broadband terahertz (THz) phase shift engineering and zero-dispersion waveplates based on dielectric metasurface have been investigated, of which structure is a periodical rectangular scattering units on silicon substrates. By designing proper geometric parameters of metasurface structure, the value, dispersion and bandwidth of the phase shift curves can be effectively manipulated. Based on this, the broadband half waveplate (HWP) and quarter waveplate (QWP) have been designed and fabricated. The experimental results show that the HWP can work in the broad range of 0.7–1.35 THz with the polarization conversion ratio (PCR) of close to 100% and the transmission of over 70%. And the QWP can operate in the range of 0.7 ∼ 0.85THz with the PCR of over 90% and the transmission of over 70%. The method of phase shift engineering based on dielectric metasurfaces and these broadband zero-dispersion waveplates have great potential in promoting the performance of THz application systems.

Simultaneous control of phase and polarization offers a large degree of freedom to tailor the beam properties, for instance, enabling generation of structured beams such as vector beams and vector vortex beams. Here, we propose an ultrathin freestanding metasurface operating at the terahertz frequency for efficient generation of vector vortex beam with an arbitrarily defined topological charge from linearly polarized excitation. The metasurface is composed of bilayer metallic patterns separated by a thin quartz slab, with one layer determining the transmission polarization and the other controlling the transmission phase. The tightly cascaded two layers form a Fabry-Perot cavity to maximize the efficiency of the polarization and phase control. Two metasurfaces for generation of radially polarized vector beam with uniform phase and vortex phase are fabricated and tested at 0.14 THz. The experimental results successfully demonstrate the generation of high-quality vector beams with the desired phase. In the experiment, the ultrathin and freestanding properties allow the metasurface to be easily combined with other components, which shows great potential for the development of various compact terahertz systems.

Graphene under optical pump has been shown to be an attractive gain medium with negative dynamic conductivity at terahertz frequencies. However, the amplification over a monolayer graphene is very weak due to its one-atom thickness. In this paper, the proposed graphene-dielectric reflective metasurface effectively improved terahertz field localization and enhanced coherent amplification. The amplification coefficient of 35 was obtained at 3.38 THz at room temperature with an infrared pump intensity of 8 W/mm2. As pump intensity increased from 0 to 15 W/mm2, we observed a loss&ndash, gain&ndash, loss transition process, which was discussed in detail through coupled-mode theory. In addition, amplification at different frequencies was achieved by merely re-optimizing the geometric parameters of the dielectric resonators. This study offers an effective solution for enhancing terahertz radiation and developing terahertz lasers.

Near-perfect anomalous reflection and refraction have been demonstrated using passive lossless metasurfaces and metagratings operating at microwave, infrared, and visible frequencies, while related studies at terahertz frequencies are lacking. Here we propose low-index (with a refractive index of 1.57) 3D-printed dielectric metagratings for efficient wide-band diffraction engineering at low terahertz frequencies. A simplified analytical model reveals that the number of propagating waveguide modes inside the grating is a key factor in diffraction engineering, and is insufficient in a low-index design regardless of the detailed dimensions in a period. Additional waveguide modes are introduced in asymmetric bilayer and trilayer metagratings, providing sufficient degrees of freedom for efficient large-angle anomalous refraction and beam splitting. These metagratings are inherently wide-band, benefiting from low dispersion of the waveguide modes. Three metagratings are designed, 3D printed, and tested experimentally at 0.14 THz for ${70}^{\ensuremath{\circ}}$ refraction, ${80}^{\ensuremath{\circ}}$ refraction, and $\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}{70}^{\ensuremath{\circ}}$ beam splitting. The measured efficiency shows good agreement with the design. The proposed metagratings, with simple structures and large feature sizes, can be easily scaled to applications at higher terahertz frequencies.

We propose a tri-band half-wave plate in the reflection mode, composed of rectangular silicon bar arrays on a 10-layer graphene substrate. By merely varying the Fermi energy of graphene from 0 to 0.25 eV, the three frequency bands shift in step and merge to a continuous dynamic bandwidth from 0.88 to 1.81 terahertz (THz). In addition, it can also dynamically switch the reflected wave among cross-linear polarization, right-handed and left-handed circular polarization in 0.93–1.35 THz. We found that the large dynamic bandwidth originates from the tunable reflection phase from the graphene layers. As it no longer depends on the plasmonic resonance in graphene, the proposed hybrid metasurface offers an alternative solution for active THz polarization devices with low biasing voltages.

Metasurfaces for multi-band or wideband polarization control are usually achieved by cascading or nesting several elements in a period, which complicate the structure and introduce crosstalk. In this work, independent polarization control is achieved around two terahertz frequencies, 0.14 THz and 0.3 THz, through a simple binary one-dimensional grating. The correlation of the phase retardation with frequency is broken, since it is determined by the propagation of a single mode at the lower frequency and by the interference of two modes at the higher frequency. Four gratings capable of different types of dual-band polarization control, a half-half wave plate, a half-quarter wave plate, a quarter-half wave plate and a quarter-quarter wave plate, are designed and experimentally tested. All the samples are made of polymers and 3D-printed as freestanding lightweight structures. The experimental results of all the samples validate polarization conversion with state-of-the-art high efficiency. Simulation results indicate their favorable bandwidth of more than 30%. The half-half wave plate gratings are further applied to build a metalens for efficient dual-band beam focusing based on the geometric phase. They show great potential in developing multifunctional terahertz elements using simple configurations.

In this work, an active nonreciprocal THz beam steering has been proposed based on a transversely magnetized metal/InSb metagrating. The nonreciprocal dispersion relation and phase shift characteristics of the metal/InSb waveguide are investigated in details. A metagrating structure with gradient phase shift has been designed based on the metal/InSb waveguide. Under the external magnetic field (EMF), the THz beam can be changed among 0, +1st, and −1st order of the metagrating. Due to the nonreciprocity of the metal/InSb metagrating, the deflection angle can be controlled by changing the positive and negative directions of the EMF, to realize bilateral symmetric scanning from −67.8° to 67.8° with over 70% diffraction efficiency, and this device also exhibits the nonreciprocal one-way transmission as an isolator with the isolation of 13 dB. This low-loss, large deflection degree, nonreciprocal beam scanner has a great potential application in the THz regime.

Mid-infrared perfect absorbers (PAs) based on metamaterials have many applications in material analysis and spectral detection thanks to the associated strong light&ndash, matter interaction. Most of the PAs are built as &lsquo, metal nanostructure&rsquo, insulator-metals (MIM). In this paper, we propose an ultra-narrow band absorber based on dielectric metasurface with a metal film substrate. The absorptance comes from the plasmonic absorption in the metal film, where the absorption is enhanced (while the band of that is compressed) by the super cavity effect of the dielectric metasurface. Based on our numerical calculation, the full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) can reach 67 nm at 8 &mu, m (8&permil, ), which is more than two orders of magnitude smaller than the resonance wavelength and much narrower than the theoretical FWHMs of MIM absorbers. Moreover, we studied their application in infrared thermal imaging, which also has more benefits than MIM absorbers. This kind of hybrid dielectric metasurface provides a new route to achieve ultra-narrow band perfect absorbers in the mid-infrared regime and can be broadly applied in detectors, thermal emitters and bio-spectroscopy.

We experimentally demonstrate an active terahertz (THz) resonance switch induced by the polarization conversion in a compound metasurface, which is a LC layer sandwiched by a metallic wire grating and resonance metamaterial (LCGM). Here, the liquid crystal (LC) plays the role of polarization conversion, which can induce the TE resonance. Moreover, there exists a localized resonance between metallic grating and metamaterial layers, and then the excited resonance will be greatly enhanced. The results show that the high extinction ratio of the resonance switch exceeds 30 dB at 0.82 THz. This work will bring new ideas for the research in developing THz phase, polarization, and switch devices with LC and metasurface.

A large-angle anomalous reflector based on a low-index polylactic acid metagrating is designed around 140 GHz. By breaking the limit of fixed bar-to-bar distance and directing the beam into the second diffraction order through the optimization of the 4π phase supercell, the efficiencies for 70° and 80° reflection under normal excitation both reach 0.82 with a wide bandwidth. In contrast, the efficiency is less than 0.2 in conventional designs. The success of the second-order low-index metagrating for large-angle deflection originates from the appropriate number of Bloch modes with well-engineered mode interactions and couplings. The design can be potentially fabricated by three-dimensional printing, with promising applications in designing flat lenses of high numerical aperture and extending the material system of metadevices.

The combination of graphene and a metasurface holds great promise for dynamic manipulation of the electromagnetic wave from low terahertz to mid-infrared. The optical response of graphene is significantly enhanced by the highly-localized fields in the meta-atoms, and the characteristics of meta-atoms can in turn be modulated in a large dynamic range through electrical doping of graphene. Graphene metasurfaces are initially focused on intensity modulation as modulators and tunable absorbers. In this paper, we review the recent progress of graphene metasurfaces for active control of the phase and the polarization. The related applications involve, but are not limited to lenses with tunable intensity or focal length, dynamic beam scanning, wave plates with tunable frequency, switchable polarizers, and real-time generation of an arbitrary polarization state, all by tuning the gate voltage of graphene. The review is concluded with a discussion of the existing challenges and the personal perspective of future directions.

High-index dielectric metasurfaces are rarely reported around 0.1-0.3 THz, as an extremely large etching depth is needed according to the millimeter-scale wavelength. In this work, we propose an easy solution to sub-THz wideband polarization control by utilizing 3D-printed low-index (n~1.5) metagratings. The metagrating with subwavelength lattice is shown as a very efficient half-wave plate (net polarization conversion of 87%) at 0.14 THz but showing noisy spectrum. The design with superwavelength lattice offers a smooth and wide bandwidth for linear polarization rotation. Study of the mechanism shows that the lattice size slightly above wavelength is a better choice for the low-index metadevice as it maintains high efficiency in the zero diffraction order and wide bandwidth due to the small mode dispersion. Such designs offer a feasible solution especially suitable for sub-THz polarization and phase control, complementary to the existing high-index dielectric and metallic metasurfaces.

The non-reciprocal circular dichroism and Faraday rotation effect for terahertz (THz) waves in longitudinally magnetized InSb were investigated by the theoretical and experimental studies in the THz regime, which indicated its ability for THz circular polarized isolator, THz circular polarizer, tunable polarization converter, and polarization modulator by the manipulation of the different magnetic fields. Furthermore, we demonstrated the InSb plasmonics based on its magneto-optical effects combined with artificial microstructure. We found the magneto-optical enhancement mechanisms in this magneto plasmonic structure, achieving broadband perfect orthogonal linear polarization conversion modulated by the weak magnetic field in the experiment. Moreover, the magneto-optical modulation with modulation depth of 95% and one-way transmission with the isolation of 33dB can be achieved by this device under a weak magnetic field of 150mT. InSb and its magnetoplasmonic device have broadly potentials for THz isolator, magneto-optical modulator, and polarization convertor in the THz application systems.

We propose a surface integral equation simulation scheme which incorporates the integral equation fast Fourier transform accelerative algorithm and domain decomposition method. Such scheme provides efficient and accurate solutions for substrate-supported non-periodic plasmonic array platforms with large number of building blocks and complex element geometry. The effect of array defects can be systematically and successfully studied taking advantage of the considerable flexibility of the domain decomposition approach. The proposed model will be of great advantage for fast and accurate characterization of graded-pattern plasmonic materials and metasurfaces.

A terahertz (THz) magneto-optical (MO) polarization rotator in reflective geometry was proposed based on metasurface structure. Combining MO material and microstructure brings new effects: (1) MO makes the classical structure of metasurface absorber becomes a polarization rotator; (2) Due to the resonance of the metasurface, Kerr rotation effect is significantly enhanced, of which rotation angle is over 90°and 5.3 times larger than the bare ferrite film. Moreover, the device can maintain an excellent performance when incident angle varies from 0 to 75 degrees. This work has broadly potentials for THz isolator, MO modulator, and polarization convertor in THz applications.

In this work, the optically anisotropic property of dual-frequency liquid crystals (DFLC) in terahertz (THz) regime has been experimentally investigated, which indicates that the refractive index and birefringence of DFLC can be continuously modulated by both the alternating frequency and intensity of the alternating electric field. This tunability originates from the rotation of DFLC molecules induced by alternating electric fields. The results show that by modulating the alternating frequency from 1 kHz to 100 kHz under 30 kV/m electric field, the 600 μm thickness DFLC cell can play as a tunable quarter-wave plate above 0.68 THz, or a half-wave plate above 1.33 THz. Besides, it can be viewed as a tunable THz phase shifter from 0 to π. Therefore, due to its novel tuning mechanism, DFLC will be of great significance in dynamic manipulating on THz phase and polarization.

Synthesization of multiple functionalities over a flat metasurface platform offers a promising approach to achieving integrated photonic devices with minimized footprint. Metasurfaces capable of diverse wavefront shaping according to wavelengths and polarizations have been demonstrated. Here we propose a class of angle-selective metasurfaces, over which beams are reflected following different and independent phase gradients in the light of the beam direction. Such powerful feature is achieved by leveraging the local phase modulation and the non-local lattice diffraction via inverse scattered field and geometry optimization in a monolayer dielectric grating, whereas most of the previous designs utilize the local phase modulation only and operate optimally for a specific angle. Beam combiner/splitter and independent multibeam deflections with up to 4 incident angles are numerically demonstrated respectively at the wavelength of 700 nm. The deflection efficiency is around 45% due to the material loss and the compromise of multi-angle responses. Flexibility of the approach is further validated by additional designs of angle-switchable metagratings as splitter/reflector and transparent/opaque mirror. The proposed designs hold great potential for increasing information density of compact optical components from the degree of freedom of angle.

Metasurfaces are ideal candidates for conformal wave manipulation on curved objects due to their low profiles and rich functionalities. Here we design and analyze conformal metasurfaces for practical optical applications at 532 nm visible band for the first time. The inclusions are silicon disk nanoantennas embedded in a flexible supporting layer of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). They behave as local phase controllers in subwavelength dimensions for successful modification of electromagnetic responses point by point, with merits of high efficiency, at visible regime, ultrathin films, good tolerance to the incidence angle and the grid stretching due to the curvy substrate. An efficient modeling technique based on field equivalence principle is systematically proposed for characterizing metasurfaces with huge arrays of nanoantennas oriented in a conformal manner. Utilizing the robust nanoantenna inclusions and benefiting from the powerful analyzing tool, we successfully demonstrate the superior performances of the conformal metasurfaces in two specific areas, with one for lensing and compensation of spherical aberration, and the other carpet cloak, both at 532 nm visible spectrum.

In this Letter, we propose a hybrid graphene-dielectric metasurface as a bi-functional polarization converter. It can switch between a reflective half-wave plate and a quarter-wave plate around 1 THz by merely applying external biasing voltage, without reoptimizing the dielectric structure. Switching of the two wave plates originates from distinct dispersion of the orthogonal eigenmodes with the chemical potential, which is further explained by the overlapping of graphene and the dielectric resonance modes. Compared with graphene-metallic metasurfaces, a combination of graphene with dielectric microstructures offers an alternative solution for active terahertz devices with high efficiency and large flexibility.

Segmented orientation of a half wave plate will convert a linear polarization into a cylindrical vector polarization. In this work, the half wave plate is achieved by 3D printed low-index dielectric grating, whose segmented rotation forms a vector beam generator. The radially and azimuthally polarized beam is experimentally measured at 140 GHz when passing through the printed sample. Further study shows that the grating lattice affects the bandwidth of the vector beam generator. The frequently used subwavelength lattice design shows narrow bandwidth due to the undesired eigenmode dispersion and interaction. In contrast, the superwavelength lattice design offers wideband and efficient vector beam generation thanks to the weak diffraction of the low-index material and the proper eigenmode dispersion. The mechanism can be applied similarly to other type of polarization control to enrich sub-terahertz elements.

While the terahertz regime has proved to be a promising solution for wireless big-data transmission, the lack of available functional devices working in this band seriously constrain the wide engineering applications. In this paper, the silver nanorods in polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) film are developed for enhancing and accelerating THz all-optical modulation. The modulation depth can reach 80% under 0.6W/cm2, and the speed can reach 3kHz which is much faster than our previous research. It has been attributed to the plasmonic hot carriers’ effect of the silver nanorods, which makes the photoexcited electrons more easily jump out of the barrier and assemble in the heterostructure between PVA and silicon. Moreover, the photoelectronic response is proved to be related to the plasmonic absorption of the pumping light, which means the modulation speed is decided by the color of the pump light. This experiment phenomenon provides a way to build color-selective terahertz all-optical modulators. Considering its capability for broadband, efficient, and fast modulation of THz waves, this low-cost and conveniently fabricated device could be broadly applied in polymer related THz devices.

An efficient auxiliary differential equation method for incorporating 2D inhomogeneous dispersive impedance sheets in the finite-difference time-domain solver is presented. This unique proposed method can successfully solve optical problems of current interest involving 2D sheets. It eliminates the need for ultrafine meshing in the thickness direction, resulting in a significant reduction of computation time and memory requirements. We apply the method to characterize a novel broad-beam leaky-wave antenna created by cascading three sinusoidally modulated reactance surfaces and also to study the effect of curvature on the radiation characteristic of a conformal impedance sheet holographic antenna. Considerable improvement in the simulation time based on our technique in comparison with the traditional volumetric model is reported. Both applications are of great interest in the field of antennas and 2D sheets.

Beyond the wave manipulation at a single frequency, efficiency bandwidth control and functional dispersion engineering over metasurfaces are key challenges towards practical applications. Here we propose a type of wideband dielectric metasurfaces made of ultra-thin and layered high-index dielectric patches. The inclusions can be considered as effective material with designable effective refractive index and dispersion. Beam-deflection metasurfaces composed of such inclusions are characterized with the bandwidth approaching and surpassing the limit of conventional blazed gratings in transmission and reflection manners. The bandwidths are more than twice of that in popular single-layer dielectric metasurfaces made of pillar and disk building blocks. In addition, the proposed design benefits from operation over wide range of incident angles and with large tolerance to fabrication errors. More complicated beam manipulation can be fulfilled similarly with great potential for wideband planar optics.

Emission of thermal radiation from periodically patterned surfaces that support surface phonon polaritons has always been into two symmetric emission angles. This is because of the nature of randomness in the thermal spectrum of a hot body that symmetrically distributes the heat into counterpropagating surface waves. Here we demonstrate the design method of metasurfaces with unconventional unit cell dimension and internal structure to direct the thermal radiation into a single specific emission angle. We utilize a combination of diffraction order engineering and numerical optimization techniques for the design process of an ultra-thin metasurface to couple counterpropagating surface waves into a single emission direction. In addition, we compute the near-field incoherent thermal emission intensity from the metasurface by combining the concepts of fluctuation dissipation theorem with solutions of Maxwell’s equations based on rigorous coupled-wave analysis and demonstrate unidirectional phaseless thermal radiation emission. The developed approach serves as a tool to design metasurfaces for manipulation of light sources with more complex nature than a plane wave.

High-resolution and fast-paced optical microscopy is a requirement for current trends in biotechnology and materials industry. The most reliable and adaptable technique so far to obtain higher resolution than conventional microscopy is near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM), which suffers from a slow-paced nature. Stemming from the principles of diffraction imaging, we present fast-paced graphene-based scanning-free wide-field optical microscopy that provides image resolution that competes with NSOM. Instead of spatial scanning of a sharp tip, we utilize the active reconfigurable nature of graphene's surface conductivity to vary the diffraction properties of a planar digitized atomically thin graphene sheet placed in the near field of an object. Scattered light through various realizations of gratings is collected at the far-field distance and postprocessed using a transmission function of surface gratings developed on the principles of rigorous coupled wave analysis. We demonstrate image resolutions of the order of λsub0/sub/16 using computational measurements through binary graphene gratings and numerical postprocessing. We also present an optimization scheme based on the genetic algorithm to predesign the unit cell structure of the gratings to minimize the complexity of postprocessing methods. We present and compare the imaging performance and noise tolerance of both grating types. While the results presented in this article are at terahertz frequencies (λsub0/sub=10 μm), where graphene is highly plasmonic, the proposed microscopy principle can be readily extended to any frequency regime subject to the availability of tunable materials.

A novel low-profile nonlinear metasurface, consisting of a single-layer of all-dielectric material, is proposed and numerically investigated by a nonlinear full-wave finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The proposed metasurface is transparent for low, and opaque for high values of incident light intensity. The metasurface design is broadly applicable to enhancement of intrinsic nonlinearities of any material with a sufficiently high refractive index contrast. We illustrate the ability of this design to enhance intrinsic nonlinear absorption of a transition metal oxide, vanadium pentoxide (V2O5), with resonant metasurface elements. The complex third-order nonlinear susceptibility (χ(3)) for V2O5, representing both nonlinear refraction and absorption is considered in FDTD simulations. Our design achieves high initial transparency (>90%) for low incident light intensity. An order of magnitude decrease in the required input light intensity threshold for nonlinear response of the metasurface is observed in comparison with an unpatterend film. The proposed all-dielectric metasurface in this work is ultrathin and easy to fabricate. We envision a number of applications of this design for thin film coatings that offer protection against high-power laser radiation.

A leaky-wave antenna is proposed that furnishes two-dimensional (2-D) beam scanning in both elevation and azimuth planes via electrical control in real time, and at a single frequency. The structure consists of a graphene sheet on a metal-backed substrate. The 2-D beam-scanning performance is achieved through the proper biasing configuration of graphene. Traditional pixel-by-pixel electrical control makes the biasing network a huge challenge for chip-scale designs in the terahertz regime and beyond. The method presented here enables dynamic control by applying two groups of one-dimensional biasing on the sides of the sheet. They are orthogonal and decoupled, with one group offering monotonic impedance variation along one direction, and the other sinusoidal impedance modulation along the other direction. The conductivity profile of the graphene sheet for a certain radiation angle, realized by applying proper voltage to each pad underneath the sheet, is determined by a holographic technique and can be reconfigured electronically and desirably. Such innovative biasing design makes real-time control of the beam direction and beamwidth simple and highly integrated. The concept is not limited to graphene-based structures, and can be generalized to any available gate-tunable material system.

In this paper, we demonstrate the concept of simultaneous controlling of the phase and the polarization handedness of a circularly polarized (CP) incident beam over an array of bilayer double split-loop resonators (DSLRs). The physical parameters are optimized by means of the finite-difference time-domain method in such a way that each unit-cell exhibits the half-wave-plate response. By simply rotating the unit-cell, the phase shift of the transmitted cross polarized beam can be controlled in the range of 0−2π without any restrictions. This plasmonic metasurface provides optimal cross polarization transmission efficiency (>70%) at 1.55 μm wavelength. An array of DSLRs with helicity dependency and spatially varying phase response offers the possibility of designing anomalous bending and bifunctional (convergence/divergence) metasurfaces in which the bending direction and convergence/divergence feature can be directly controlled by the handedness of the impinging CP wave. Furthermore, a metalens with the capability of converting a CP Gaussian beam into a uniform irradiance profile (flat-top beam) is designed, and the performance of structure is evaluated in detail. All the designs are composed of the same DSLR elements with space-variant orientations.