Recently reported metamaterial analogues of electromagnetically induced transparency enable a unique route to endow classical optical structures with aspects of quantum optical systems. This method opens up many fascinating prospects on novel optical components, such as slow light units, highly sensitive sensors and nonlinear devices. In particular, optical control of electromagnetically induced transparency in metamaterials promises essential application opportunities in optical networks and terahertz communications. Here we present active optical control of metamaterial-induced transparency through active tuning of the dark mode. By integrating photoconductive silicon into the metamaterial unit cell, a giant switching of the transparency window occurs under excitation of ultrafast optical pulses, allowing for an optically tunable group delay of the terahertz light. This work opens up the possibility for designing novel chip-scale ultrafast devices that would find utility in optical buffering and terahertz active filtering.

Metasurfaces have attracted large interest in recent years due to their relatively simple fabrication, compact design, and ability to control the wavefront of incident light. Ohmic loss attributed to bulk metal metamaterials are not a primary issue, whereby the meta-atom or plasmonic structure is typically only as thin as a fraction of the operation wavelength. Numerous novel applications have been demonstrated by metasurfaces, including an ultrathin metasurface flat lens, and 3D holography.Here, by combining the freedom of both the structural design and the orientation of split ring resonator antennas, we demonstrate Terahertz metasurfaces that are capable of controlling both the phase and amplitude profiles over a very broad bandwidth at~1THz under linearly-polarised incidence. As an example, we show that these phase-amplitude metasurfaces can be engineered to control the diffraction orders arbitrarily.

The limiting effects of varying the thickness of a dielectric overlayer on planar double split-ring resonator (SRR) arrays are studied by terahertz time-domain spectroscopy. Uniform dielectric overlayers from 100 nm to 16 mum thick are deposited onto fixed SRR arrays in order to shift the resonance frequency of the electric response. We discuss the bounds of resonance shifting and emphasize the resulting limitations for SRR-based sensing. These results are presented in the context of typical biosensing situations and are compared to previous work and other existing sensing platforms.

A broadband terahertz wave deflector based on metasurface induced phase discontinuities is reported. Various frequency components ranging from 0.43 to 1.0 THz with polarization orthogonal to the incidence are deflected into a broad range of angles from 25° to 84°. A Fresnel zone plate consequently developed from the beam deflector is capable of focusing a broadband terahertz radiation.

Metamaterials based on effective media can be used to produce a number of unusual physical properties (for example, negative refraction and invisibility cloaking) because they can be tailored with effective medium parameters that do not occur in nature. Recently, the use of coding metamaterials has been suggested for the control of electromagnetic waves through the design of coding sequences using digital elements ‘0’ and ‘1,' which possess opposite phase responses. Here we propose the concept of an anisotropic coding metamaterial in which the coding behaviors in different directions are dependent on the polarization status of the electromagnetic waves. We experimentally demonstrate an ultrathin and flexible polarization-controlled anisotropic coding metasurface that functions in the terahertz regime using specially designed coding elements. By encoding the elements with elaborately designed coding sequences (both 1-bit and 2-bit sequences), the x- and y-polarized waves can be anomalously reflected or independently diffused in three dimensions. The simulated far-field scattering patterns and near-field distributions are presented to illustrate the dual-functional performance of the encoded metasurface, and the results are consistent with the measured results. We further demonstrate the ability of the anisotropic coding metasurfaces to generate a beam splitter and realize simultaneous anomalous reflections and polarization conversions, thus providing powerful control of differently polarized electromagnetic waves. The proposed method enables versatile beam behaviors under orthogonal polarizations using a single metasurface and has the potential for use in the development of interesting terahertz devices.