In this paper, we demonstrate that terahertz (THz) metamaterials are powerful tools for determination of dielectric constants of polymer films and polar liquids.

Most microbial detection techniques require pretreatment, such as fluorescent labeling and cultivation processes. Here, we propose novel tools for classifying and identifying microorganisms such as molds, yeasts, and bacteria based on their intrinsic dielectric constants in the THz frequency range. We first measured the dielectric constant of films that consisted of a wide range of microbial species, and extracted the values for the individual microbes using the effective medium theory. The dielectric constant of the molds was 1.24-1.85, which was lower than that of bacteria ranging from 2.75-4.11. The yeasts exhibited particularly high dielectric constants reaching 5.63-5.97, which were even higher than that of water. These values were consistent with the results of low-density measurements in an aqueous environment using microfluidic metamaterials. In particular, a blue shift in the metamaterial resonance occurred for molds and bacteria, whereas the molds have higher contrast relative to bacteria in the aqueous environment. By contrast, the deposition of the yeasts induced a red shift because their dielectric constant was higher than that of water. Finally, we measured the dielectric constants of peptidoglycan and polysaccharides such as chitin, α-glucan, and β-glucans (with short and long branches), and confirmed that cell wall composition was the main cause of the observed differences in dielectric constants for different types of microorganisms.

We studied experimentally and theoretically the vertical range of the confined electric field in the gap area of metamaterials, which was analyzed for various gap widths using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy. We measured the resonant frequency as a function of the thickness of poly(methyl methacrylate) in the range 0 to 3.2 μm to quantify the effective detection volumes. We found that the effective vertical range of the metamaterial is determined by the size of the gap width. The vertical range was found to decrease as the gap width of the metamaterial decreases, whereas the sensitivity is enhanced as the gap width decreases due to the highly concentrated electric field. Our experimental findings are in good agreement with the finite-difference time-domain simulation results. Finally, a numerical expression was obtained for the vertical range as a function of the gap width. This expression is expected to be very useful for optimizing the sensing efficiency.