Penrose tiling-inspired graphene-covered multiband terahertz metamaterial absorbers

Abstract

In this work, we propose two different graphene-covered nanostructured metamaterial absorbers inspired by Penrose tiling. These absorbers allow spectrally tunable absorption within the terahertz spectrum corresponding to 0.2-20 THz. We have conducted finite-difference time-domain analyses to determine the tunability of these metamaterial absorbers. The proposed structures, Penrose models 1 and 2, perform differently from each other due to their design characteristics. Penrose model 2 reaches a perfect absorption at 8.58 THz. In addition, the relative absorption bandwidth calculated at full-wave at half-maximum in Penrose model 2 varies between 5.2% and 9.4%, which characterizes the metamaterial absorber as a wideband absorber. Also, we can observe that as we increase the Fermi level of graphene from 0.1 to 1 eV, the absorption bandwidth and relative absorption bandwidth both increase. Our findings show the high tunability of both models through varying graphene’s Fermi level, the graphene’s thickness, the substrate’s refractive index, and the proposed structures’ polarization. We can further observe multiple tunable absorption profiles that may find applications in designer infrared absorbers, optoelectronic devices, and THz sensors.