Vanadium dioxide based frequency tunable metasurface filters for realizing reconfigurable terahertz optical phase and polarization control

Abstract

Metasurfaces are two dimensional arrays of artificial subwavelength resonators, which can manipulate the amplitude and phase profile of incident electromagnetic fields. To date, limited progress has been achieved in realizing reconfigurable phase control of incident waves using metasurfaces. Here, an active metasurface is presented, whose resonance frequency can be tuned by employing insulator to metal transition in vanadium dioxide. By virtue of the phase jump accompanied by the resonance frequency tuning, the proposed metasurface acts as a phase shifter at THz frequency. It is further demonstrated that by appropriately tailoring the anisotropy of the metasurface, the observed phase shift can be used to switch the transmitted polarization from circular to approximately linear. This work thus shows potential for reconfigurable phase and polarization control at THz frequencies using vanadium dioxide based frequency tunable metasurfaces.

Reconfigurable Terahertz Quarter-Wave Plate for Helicity Switching Based on Babinet Inversion of an Anisotropic Checkerboard Metasurface

“…Recently, the progress of metasurfaces has motivated research into dynamic terahertz polarization control utilizing photoswitchable chiral metamolecules [5], deformable MEMS (micro electro mechanical systems) spirals [6,7], gate-tunable polarization modulators with graphene [8], tunable MEMS cross-polarization converters [9], and tunable wave plates with actuated microcantilever arrays to switch circular and linear polarization states of transmitted waves [10]. Phase change materials such as vanadium dioxide have also been applied to dynamic quarter-wave * nakata@qc.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp plates with variable working frequencies [11,12] and reconfigurable polarization modulators between linear and circular polarization states [13,14]. Despite these remarkable achievements, designing switchable metasurfaces that have desired functionalities with deep modulation contrast is still challenging.…”

Dual‐band reconfigurable coding metasurfaces hybridized with vanadium dioxide for wavefront manipulation at terahertz frequencies

“…In 2018, an encrypted graphene‐based coding metasurface was proposed by Momeni et al at THz frequencies for various security applications . In 2018, Tayyab Nouman et al presented a vanadium dioxide (VO 2 )‐based metasurface, which acts as a phase shifter at THz frequency . In summary, various tunable materials work well at THz frequencies, but their performance varies.…”

A Terahertz Quarter Wave Plate Based on Staggered Split Ring Resonators

“…Great efforts have been made to improve the performance of THz-QWP. Common THz-QWP approximately includes three types: split ring resonators (SRRs) [1], cross-shaped resonators [2], and meander-line [3]. Based on the ring-cross resonators, Zhang et al [4] proposed a QWP which can convert ±45 • polarized incident wave into the left (right) circularly polarized wave between 10.8 and 12.8 GHz.…”