Graphene-empowered dynamic metasurfaces and metadevices

Abstract

Metasurfaces, with extremely exotic capabilities to manipulate electromagnetic (EM) waves, have derived a plethora of advanced metadevices with intriguing functionalities. Tremendous endeavors have been mainly devoted to the static metasurfaces and metadevices, where the functionalities cannot be actively tuned in situ post-fabrication. Due to the intrinsic advantage of active tunability by external stimulus, graphene has been successively demonstrated as a favorable candidate to empower metasurfaces with remarkably dynamic tunability, and their recent advances are propelling the EM wave manipulations to a new height: from static to dynamic. Here, we review the recent progress on dynamic metasurfaces and metadevices enabled by graphene with the focus on electrically-controlled dynamic manipulation of the EM waves covering the mid-infrared, terahertz, and microwave regimes. The fundamentals of graphene, including basic material properties and plasmons, are first discussed. Then, graphene-empowered dynamic metasurfaces and metadevices are divided into two categories, i.e., metasurfaces with building blocks of structured graphene and hybrid metasurfaces integrated with graphene, and their recent advances in dynamic spectrum manipulation, wavefront shaping, polarization control, and frequency conversion in near/far fields and global/local ways are elaborated. In the end, we summarize the progress, outline the remaining challenges, and prospect the potential future developments.

Transmittion and slow-light analysis based on tunable plasmon-induced transparency in patterned monolayer graphene metamaterial and its sensing application

“…As a two-dimensional material with an atomic thickness, graphene has attracted much attentions owing to its unique photoelectric properties such as ultra-high intrinsic carrier mobility, low loss and adjustable bandgap. The linear energy-momentum dispersion near the Dirac point renders electrons travelling at a constant velocity of 3×10 6 m/s in graphene, which implies that graphene-based electronics and optoelectronics have the potential to operate at speed of THz [22]. The permittivity of the graphene ε g can be written as [23] ϵ g = 1 + iσ ϵ 0 ωd g where d g is the thickness of graphene layer, ϵ 0 is the permittivity in the vacuum, σ is the surface conductivity of graphene, and ω is the angular frequency.…”

High Performance Graphene–C60–Bismuth Telluride–C60–Graphene Nanometer Thin Film Phototransistor with Adjustable Positive and Negative Responses

“…[7][8][9] Since Xia et al prepared the first graphene phototransistor in 2009, [10] graphene has been used in hybrid systems with various materials or even physical local fields to achieve photoelectric detection. [11] For example, metasurfaces, [12][13][14] quantum dots (QDs), [15] nanowires, [16,17] bulk materials, [18] transition metal dichalcogenide materials, [19,20] perovskite materials, [21][22][23] and various organic substances [24][25][26] have been combined with graphene to achieve a high performance photoelectric detection. [27] These works have extensively promoted the research progress of graphene in the field of photoelectric detection.…”

Switchable Wideband Terahertz Absorber Based on Refractory and Vanadium Dioxide Metamaterials

“…The properties of previous metamaterials are not easily changed once their structure is determined. According to the former study, using tunable materials is an excellent method to overcome the limitation, such as liquid crystal [19], Ge 2 Sb 2 Te 5 (GST) [20], VO 2 [37], and graphene [22], reconfigurable metal [23]. Phase-change materials have drawn a lot of attention in the realm of active photonics because of their excellent electrical and optical capabilities [24], [25], [26], [27].…”