A Polarization-Insensitive and Wide-Angle Terahertz Absorber with Ring-Porous Patterned Graphene Metasurface

Nanomaterials (Basel). 2020 Jul 19;10(7):1410. doi: 10.3390/nano10071410.

Abstract

A broadband terahertz (THz) absorber, based on a graphene metasurface, which consists of a layer of ring-porous patterned structure array and a metallic mirror separated by an ultrathin SiO2 dielectric layer, is proposed and studied by numerical simulation. The simulated results show that the absorptivity of the absorber reaches 90% in the range of 0.91-1.86 THz, and the normalized bandwidth of the absorptivity is 68.6% under normal incidence. In the simulation, the effects of the geometric parameters of the structure on the absorption band have been investigated. The results show that the absorber is insensitive to the incident polarization angle for both transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) under normal incidence. In addition, the absorber is not sensitive to oblique incidence of the light source under TE polarization conditions, and has an approximately stable absorption bandwidth at the incident angle from 0° to 50°. The absorption band can be adjusted by changing the bias voltage of the graphene Fermi level without varying the nanostructure. Furthermore, we propose that a two-layer graphene structure with the same geometric parameters is separated by a dielectric layer of appropriate thickness. The simulated results show that the absorptivity of the two-layer absorber reaches 90% in the range of 0.83-2.04 THz and the normalized bandwidth of the absorptivity is 84.3% under normal incidence. Because of its excellent characteristics based on graphene metamaterial absorbers, it has an important application value in the field of subwavelength photonic devices.

Keywords: broadband absorber; graphene; metasurface; terahertz.