Liquid crystal-based wide-angle metasurface absorber with large frequency tunability and low voltage

Abstract

A tunable metasurface absorber (MA) based on polymer network liquid crystal is introduced in this paper. Despite the well-designed unit cell patterns, the proposed MA can achieve both large frequency tunability and wide-angle stability. Compared with traditional liquid crystal-based metasurfaces, the measured results suggest that the recovery time of the proposed structure was reduced by half. By applying an external voltage on the top electrode of the liquid crystal layer from 0 to a saturation voltage of 10 V, the absorption peak of the MA can be tuned from 112.7 GHz to 102.2 GHz, with a maximum frequency tunability of 9.3%, which is significantly higher than other proposed liquid crystal-based metasurfaces. Moreover, the proposed tunable absorber can maintain absorption greater than 90% with incident angles reaching up to 60° for both transverse electric and transverse magnetic polarizations. This design provides an efficient way for developing low-power consumption terahertz devices with large frequency tunability and wide-angle stability.