Origami-Based Reconfigurable Metamaterials for Tunable Chirality

Zuojia Wang; Liqiao Jing; Kan Yao; Yihao Yang; Bin Zheng; Costas M Soukoulis; Hongsheng Chen; Yongmin Liu

doi:10.1002/adma.201700412

Origami-Based Reconfigurable Metamaterials for Tunable Chirality

Adv Mater. 2017 Jul;29(27). doi: 10.1002/adma.201700412. Epub 2017 May 8.

Authors

Zuojia Wang^{1

2

3}, Liqiao Jing², Kan Yao⁴, Yihao Yang^{2

5}, Bin Zheng², Costas M Soukoulis^{5

6}, Hongsheng Chen², Yongmin Liu^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
² State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China.
³ School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, 250100, China.
⁴ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA.
⁵ Department of Physics and Astronomy and Ames Laboratory-U.S. DOE, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011, USA.
⁶ Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser, FORTH, 71110, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.

PMID: 28481048
DOI: 10.1002/adma.201700412

Abstract

Origami is the art of folding two-dimensional (2D) materials, such as a flat sheet of paper, into complex and elaborate three-dimensional (3D) objects. This study reports origami-based metamaterials whose electromagnetic responses are dynamically controllable via switching the folding state of Miura-ori split-ring resonators. The deformation of the Miura-ori unit along the third dimension induces net electric and magnetic dipoles of split-ring resonators parallel or anti-parallel to each other, leading to the strong chiral responses. Circular dichroism as high as 0.6 is experimentally observed while the chirality switching is realized by controlling the deformation direction and kinematics. In addition, the relative density of the origami metamaterials can be dramatically reduced to only 2% of that of the unfolded structure. These results open a new avenue toward lightweight, reconfigurable, and deployable metadevices with simultaneously customized electromagnetic and mechanical properties.

Keywords: metamaterials; origami; reconfigurable materials.