Magnetically tunable terahertz metamaterial by polymeric microactuators (Conference Presentation)

Tunable THz metamaterials has shown great potential to solve the material challenge due to the so called “THz gap”. However, the tunable mechanism of current designs relies on using semiconductors insertions, which inevitably results in high ohmic loss, and thereby significantly degrades the performance of metamaterials. In this work, we demonstrate a novel tunable mechanism based on polymetric microactuators. Our metamaterials are fabricated on the surface of patterned pillar array of flexible polymers embedded with magnetic nanoparticles. The transmission spectrum of the metamaterial can be tuned as the pillars are mechanically deformed though applied magnetic field. Compared to previous semiconductor based tunable mechanism, our structure has shown much lower loss.