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Optical and Electrical Characterization of Pure PMMA for Terahertz Wide-band Metamaterial Absorbers

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Abstract

The characteristics of relative permittivity and reflectance for poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) films prepared by spin-coating were investigated and an excellent wideband terahertz (THz) metamaterial absorber (MA) had been fabricated by employing PMMA film as the dielectric layer. XRD and AFM indicated that all the PMMA films with thicknesses from 11 to 17 μm were amorphous and extremely smooth with roughness about 0.203 nm. Raman results demonstrated that vibration strength of the same covalent bonds tends to be consistent with an increase in film thickness. The dual beam laser interferometer (DBLI) was employed to study the influence of applied frequency and thickness on the relative permittivity, and the results exhibited dielectric constants increased from 2.88 to 4.04 with the thickness increasing from 9 to 14 μm. And the dielectric constants for PMMA films with a certain thickness (8 μm) gradually declined when the applied frequency increased from 100 to 105 Hz; besides, the dielectric constant in THz band was forecasted approximately 2.5. The terahertz time domain spectrometer (THz-TDS) results revealed that the THz reflectance was of gradual degradation from 80 to 58% at 3.2 THz, as the thickness increased from 11 to 17 μm. In addition, the UV-VIS spectrum showed that thickness had little effect on reflectance and transmittance in visible region, leading to the almost same Eg (energy gap) about 3.7 eV. At last, by employing PMMA film as the dielectric layer, a highly wideband metamaterial absorber with absorption > 80% from 4.1 to 7.4 THz was fabricated.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Inorganic Coating Materials CAS, Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200050, People’s Republic of China

    Zaiying Shi, Lixin Song & Tao Zhang

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, People’s Republic of China

    Zaiying Shi

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Correspondence to Tao Zhang.

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Shi, Z., Song, L. & Zhang, T. Optical and Electrical Characterization of Pure PMMA for Terahertz Wide-band Metamaterial Absorbers. J Infrared Milli Terahz Waves 40, 80–91 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10762-018-0553-8

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