Highly flexible broadband terahertz metamaterial quarter-wave plate

Metamaterials offer exciting opportunities that enable precise control of light propagation, its intensity and phase by designing an artificial medium of choice. Inducing birefringence via engineered metamolecules presents a fascinating mechanism to manipulate the phase of electromagnetic waves and facilitates the design of polarimetric devices. In this paper, a high-efficiency, broadband, tunable and flexible quarter-wave plate based on a multilayer metamaterial is presented. Excellent achromatic pi/2 phase retardance with high transmission is observed upon terahertz propagation through the quarter-wave plate. The calculated Stokes parameter represents the output polarization state numerically, indicating an excellent broadband conversion of linearly polarized light into circularly polarized light. The metamaterialbased quarter-wave plate demonstrated in this work could be an important step forward in the development of functional terahertz polarization conversion devices for practical applications.