Graphene-based Metasurfaces for Multimode Tunable Terahertz Modulators

Metamaterials are artificial structures with engineered electromagnetic properties derived from the arrangement of metallic unit cells (or meta-atoms). The feature size of the unit cell is directly proportional to the wavelength of interest. Therefore, large gains in research and development of metamaterials have been made in longer wavelengths due to well-established microfabrication techniques. Graphene metastructures have several advantages over traditional metallic structures including, but not limited to high carrier mobility, flexibility and tunability through application of a gate voltage or external field. Therefore, the objective of this research is to fabricate the theoretically proposed tunable graphene metamaterial terahertz (THz) devices with high amplitude modulation (up to ~80%) and tunability (up to 400 GHz). The active surface of the fabricated devices is 2.5 x 2.5 mm2 and measurements to monitor the ability to modulate THz waves were made using a high resolution terahertz time-domain spectrometer. We aim integrate these devices into systems for sensing and quantum electronics applications.