Optoelectronic terahertz modulators, operated by actively tuning metamaterial, plasmonic resonator structures, have helped to unlock a myriad of terahertz applications, ranging from spectroscopy and imaging to communications. At the same time, due to the inherently versatile dispersion properties of metamaterials, they offer unique platforms for studying intriguing phenomena such as negative refractive index and slow light.
Active resonance frequency tuning of a metamaterial working in the terahertz regime is achieved by integrating metal-coupled resonator arrays with electrically tunable graphene. This metamaterial device exploits coupled plasmonic resonators to exhibit an electromagnetically induced transparency analog, resulting in the splitting of the resonance into coupled hybrid optical
modes. By variably dampening one of the resonators using graphene, the coupling condition is electrically modulated and continuous tuning of the metamaterial resonance frequency is achieved. This device, operating at room temperature, can readily be implemented as a fast, optoelectronic, tunable band pass/reject filter with a tuning range of ≈100 GHz operating at 1.5 THz.
The reconfigurable dispersion properties of this device can also be implemented for modulation of the group delay for slow light applications.