Switching terahertz waves with gate-controlled active graphene metamaterials

The extraordinary electronic properties of graphene provided the main thrusts for the rapid advance of graphene electronics(1). In photonics, the gate-controllable electronic properties of graphene provide a route to efficiently manipulate the interaction of photons with graphene, which has recently sparked keen interest in graphene plasmonics(2-10). However, the electro-optic tuning capability of unpatterned graphene alone is still not strong enough for practical optoelectronic applications owing to its non-resonant Drude-like behaviour. Here, we demonstrate that substantial gate-induced persistent switching and linear modulation of terahertz waves can be achieved in a two-dimensional metamaterial(11,12), into which an atomically thin, gated two-dimensional graphene layer is integrated. The gate-controllable light-matter interaction in the graphene layer can be greatly enhanced by the strong resonances of the metamaterial(13). Although the thickness of the embedded single-layer graphene is more than six orders of magnitude smaller than the wavelength (