Abstract-Mechanically tunable terahertz metamaterials

Jining Li^1,2, Charan M. Shah³, Withawat Withayachumnankul¹, Benjamin S.-Y. Ung¹, Arnan Mitchell³, Sharath Sriram³, Madhu Bhaskaran³, Shengjiang Chang², and Derek Abbott¹

¹School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia
²Institute of Modern Optics, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China
³Functional Materials and Microsystems Research Group, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC 3001, Australia                        

http://apl.aip.org/resource/1/applab/v102/i12/p121101_s1?isAuthorized=no

Electromagnetic device design and flexible electronics fabrication are combined to demonstrate mechanically tunable metamaterials operating at terahertz frequencies. Each metamaterial comprises a planar array of resonators on a highly elastic polydimethylsiloxane substrate. The resonance of the metamaterials is controllable through substrate deformation. Applying a stretching force to the substrate changes the inter-cell capacitance and hence the resonance frequency of the resonators. In the experiment, greater than 8% of the tuning range is achieved with good repeatability over several stretching-relaxing cycles. This study promises applications in remote strain sensing and other controllable metamaterial-based devices.

© 2013 American Institute of Physics