Electrically driven active VO2/MXene metasurface for the terahertz modulation

Abstract

With the growing demand for broadband wireless communication, high-resolution radar, security inspection, and biological analysis, terahertz (THz) technology has made significant progress in recent years. The wide applications of THz technology benefited from the rapid development of various THz functional devices. Metasurface, an essential means of manipulating THz waves, has widely been applied in multiple THz functional devices. However, it is still a great challenge to construct flexible THz metasurface devices due to the lack of flexibility of traditional semiconductor and metal materials. In this work, a two-dimensional material, MXene, is used to prepare flexible metasurfaces with frequency filtering and polarization functions. By further combining with the phase-transition-material vanadium dioxide, the VO2/MXene metasurface exhibits good performance in amplitude modulation under electrical stimulation. The modulation depth of the device reaches 86% under a lower trigger power of 11.6 mW/mm2 and the response time is only ∼100 ms. Such a flexible active metasurface with superior performance and high integration will be useful in THz imaging systems, THz sensing systems, etc.

MXenes hierarchical architectures: electromagnetic absorbing, shielding and devices

“…The filter can select the EM wave of characteristic frequency, which can make the useful wave pass through the filter almost losslessly, while the EM wave of other useless frequencies can be blocked. Li et al made a terahertz filter using MXenes [32]. They prepared a flexible film by vacuum filtration of MXene solution, then cut it with femtosecond laser to make a rectangular slot array.…”

“…Based on the strong attenuation of EM waves, EM attenuators and EM generators were constructed [28,29,129,130]. Based on the modulation of EM waves by MXenes, a variety of wireless communication devices were constructed [14,[30][31][32]. And based on the environmental sensitivity, a variety of wireless sensor devices were constructed [33,[133][134][135][136].…”

“…Reprinted from [31], Copyright (2022), with permission from Elsevier. Reprinted from [32], with the permission of AIP Publishing. [33] John Wiley & Sons.…”

“…In this review, we systematically summarize the progress of research on MXenes hierarchical architecture for EM absorbing, shielding and devices. As shown in figure 1 [23,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39], different fabrication methods of MXenes hierarchical architecture are introduced in detail. The EM response mechanism of MXenes hierarchical architecture are concluded.…”