Switchable Multifunctional Meta-Surface Composed by Dielectric-Metal Hybrid Antenna Array Architecture

Nanomaterials (Basel). 2021 Oct 27;11(11):2862. doi: 10.3390/nano11112862.

Abstract

Strontium titanate (STO), the dielectric material, has caught the world's attention due to its outstanding properties, such as high permittivity, high refractive index, and low loss in the terahertz band. Its permittivity is relevant to the environment temperature. Herein, a multifunctional meta-surface composed of a dielectric-metal hybrid antenna array has been demonstrated, which is a single-layer STO elliptic cylinder. On the one hand, when the environment temperature is 300 K, the proposed meta-surface can achieve perfect absorption and polarization conversion in the frequency range from 0.1 to 0.25 THz; particularly, the meta-surface absorptance can reach 99.97% and 99.92% at a frequency of 0.103 and 0.13 THz respectively, and while it is used as a polarization conversion device, the degree of circular polarization and the ellipticity angle can reach 0.986 and 44.5° at a frequency of 0.228 THz. On the other hand, when the environment temperature changes from 300 to 450 K, the absorption peak changes with the temperature, and the average absorptance reaches 96% at resonance frequency. The proposed meta-surface can be applied in many fields, such as optical sensing, imaging, and energy harvesting. Moreover, it provides a potential solution to research the integrated device in a complex electromagnetic environment.

Keywords: optical antenna; perfect absorber; polarization converter; terahertz device.