A broad dual-band switchable graphene-based terahertz
metamaterial absorber
Limei Qi
*
, Chang Liu, Syed Mohsin Ali Shah
School of Electronic Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xitucheng Road No.10, Haidian District, Beijing, 100876, China
article info
Article history:
Received 4 March 2019
Received in revised form
31 May 2019
Accepted 3 July 2019
Available online 9 July 2019
abstract
A switchable graphene-based terahertz metamaterial absorber is proposed by using nonstructured
graphene loaded with simple dielectric resonators, which can achieve both the broad and dual-band
absorption with polarization-independent and wide-angle characteristics. The relative bandwidth of
the two bands above 80% absorption reaches 97.8% and 31% in the frequency range of 0.473e1.407 THz
and 2.273e3.112 THz, respectively. By changing the chemical potential of graphene, the state of the
absorber can be switched from absorption (>80%) to reflection (>91%) over the two broad bands. Physical
mechanisms of the broad dual-band switchable absorber are investigated by the impedance matching
theory and the coupled-mode theory. The dual bands are caused by the Fabry-Perot resonance of
dielectric substrate, the broad and high absorption originates from the appropriate impedance match
between the absorber and free space. As the absorber is based on a monolayer nonstructured graphene
loaded with simple dielectric resonators, the processing difficulty will be reduced greatly and it is easy to
tune it through the bias voltage. This structure provides a new perspective to design broad multi-band
absorbers and would have promising applications in multiple amplitude modulators, imaging and
sensing.
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
As an essential component of Terahertz (THz) technology, THz
devices have attracted a great deal of attention due to their
remarkable properties in THz region (0.3e10 THz) [ 1e3]. Fruitful
results have been reported in imaging [4], sensing [5] and
communicating [6], etc. Among these applications, the absorber
plays a significant role in many devices working in THz range [7],
including modulator [8], cloaking [9] and so on. Generally, ab-
sorbers are designed as a sandwich structure where the top metal
pattern and the bottom metal ground separated by a dielectric
spacer [10], by changing the shape and size of the subwavelength
metallic elements, both the electric and magnetic response of
electromagnetic radiation can be tuned [11 ]. Graphene, a flat
monolayer of carbon atoms closely packed in a 2D honeycomb
lattice has been a hot-spot in recent years [12e14]. As the surface
conductivity of graphene can be tuned easily by electrostatic
doping or applying bias voltage [15e17], a large amount of work has
been done to achieve the tunable graphene-based absorbers in THz
range [18e24]. However, these tunable absorbers usually work at
narrow frequencies due to their resonance features and may not
suit many practical applications that have bandwidth re-
quirements, such as bolometers, solar energy-harvesting devices
and optoelectronic devices.
Various methods have been adopted to realize broadband ab-
sorption. Typical approaches include using the multilayered gra-
phene structures [25,26], discrete patterns of graphene structures
[27e29], and continuous structured graphene [30e32]. However, it
is difficult and complex to put multilayered graphene or discrete
patterns of graphene with biasing voltages into application. In
addition, these structured graphene will unavoidably introduce
truncation edges of the graphene, which might lead to edge effects
in practice, such as unordered diffuse scattering losses [33,34]. To
avoid these problems, absorbers using nonstructured graphene are
put forward [7,35]. For the absorber utilizing the nonstructured
graphene loaded with arrays of elliptic dielectric cylinders, the
relative bandwidth above 90% absorption reaches 65% [7]. For the
absorber utilizing nonstructured graphene loaded with periodical
dielectric wires, the 60% relative bandwidth is obtained for the
near-perfect absorption of 99% [
35].
The broadband terahertz
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: qilimei1204@163.com (L. Qi).
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Carbon
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/carbon
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.carbon.2019.07.011
0008-6223/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Carbon 153 (2019) 179e188