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A Single-Resonant-Structure and Optically Transparent Broadband THz Metamaterial Absorber

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Abstract

Broadband THz metamaterial absorbers have important applications in terahertz modulation, imaging, and communication, but current designs usually involve complex nesting or stacking resonant structures. This paper reports a single-resonant-structure and optically transparent broadband terahertz metamaterial absorber. The absorber demonstrates > 80% broadband absorption in a wide frequency range of 0.4~1.04 THz, or 88.9% of the central frequency. The thickness of the absorber is only 1/15 of the wavelength corresponding to the lowest absorption frequency. The absorption spectrum has been experimentally verified with a reflective terahertz time-domain spectrometer. Further study shows that the absorber is insensitive to the polarization angle, and the absorbance decreases very little for incident angles less than 30°. The absorption spectrum can be finely tuned by varying the structure parameters.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61627802 and Grant 11874333, in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 30917012202, in part by the Aeronautical Science Foundation of China under Grant 2017ZF59005, and in part by the Key Research and Development Plan of Jiangsu Province under Grant BE2018728. The authors thank Prof. Ziran Zhao and Prof. Yingxin Wang at Tsinghua University for valuable discussions about the experiments. The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094, China

    Junjie Wang, Yanghui Wu, Senfeng Lai & Wenhua Gu

  2. Optics Division, National Institute of Metrology, Beijing, 100029, China

    Yuqiang Deng

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  1. Junjie Wang
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  2. Yuqiang Deng
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  3. Yanghui Wu
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  4. Senfeng Lai
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  5. Wenhua Gu
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Correspondence to Wenhua Gu.

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Wang, J., Deng, Y., Wu, Y. et al. A Single-Resonant-Structure and Optically Transparent Broadband THz Metamaterial Absorber. J Infrared Milli Terahz Waves 40, 648–656 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10762-019-00598-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10762-019-00598-w

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