Microcavity enhancement of terahertz absorbing metamaterials

Abstract

This work pertains to the design, development and experimentation of Terahertz Metasurfaces and their inclusion within microcavities to achieve a near perfect, tunable absorber. Early chapters discuss terahertz technology, its applications and the obstacles needed to overcome for its further development. After which the theory behind metamaterials and more specifically split ring resonators is discussed along with simulations of multiple resonator designs with a resonant response within the Terahertz domain. The theory behind and the experimental results for the metamaterial microcavities is discussed and shows that the resonant response of these materials is tunable through manipulation of the cavity. The mechanisms behind the interactions between the microcavity and the metamaterial are explored through simulations which show the enhancement effect is caused by the interference between light that travels through the microcavity and the light reflected from the metasurface. Experimentally it is shown that absorption can be achieved up to -45.8dB through the manipulation of the aforementioned metamaterial and microcavity while also displaying a phase singularity in phase space around this peak absorption. This achievable high absorption and tunability would allow for accurate detection of THz across a tunable range of frequencies. Further work is proposed for next stages of implementation of the microcavities.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Vasileios Apostolopoulos: orcid.org/0000-0003-3733-2191

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