Switching teraherz waves with gate-controlled active graphene metamaterials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that integrating gate-controlled graphene with metamaterials enables significant, tunable modulation of terahertz waves, including amplitude, phase, and persistent memory effects, at room temperature.

Contribution

It introduces a novel active graphene metamaterial that achieves large, gate-controlled terahertz wave modulation and persistent memory effects, surpassing previous electro-optic tuning limitations.

Findings

90% amplitude modulation of terahertz waves

Over 40 degrees phase shift achieved

Hysteretic behavior indicating photonic memory

Abstract

The extraordinary electronic properties of graphene, such as its continuously gate-variable ambipolar field effect and the resulting steep change in resistivity, provided the main thrusts for the rapid advance of graphene electronics. The gate-controllable electronic properties of graphene provide a route to efficiently manipulate the interaction of low-energy photons with massless Dirac fermions, which has recently sparked keen interest in graphene plasmonics. However, the electro-optic tuning capability of unpatterned graphene alone is still not strong enough for practical optoelectronic applications due to its nonresonant Drude-like behaviour. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that substantial gate-induced persistent switching and linear modulation of terahertz waves can be achieved in a two-dimensional artificial material, referred to as a metamaterial, into which an atomically thin, gated two-dimensional graphene layer is integrated. The gate-controllable light-matter interaction in the graphene layer can be greatly enhanced by the strong resonances and the corresponding field enhancement in the metamaterial. Although the thickness of the embedded single-layer graphene is more than 'six' orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength (< {\lambda}/1,000,000), the one-atom-thick layer, in conjunction with the metamaterial, can modulate both the amplitude of the transmitted wave by up to 90 per cent and its phase by more than 40 degrees at room temperature. More interestingly, the gate-controlled active graphene metamaterials show hysteretic behaviour in the transmission of terahertz waves, especially when fabricated with multilayer graphene, which is indicative of persistent photonic memory effects.