Thermo-optical applications of a novel terahertz semiconductor metamaterial design

In this paper, a novel semiconductor metamaterial design based on electronically induced reflection is proposed, and its thermo-optic applications at the terahertz frequency are investigated. The analytical results show that the peak resonance wavelength position depended very sensitively on the temperature of the structure. The roomtemperature operation up to 9 mu m/K at T = 295 K is achieved, which is more than the other values in the literature. It is also shown that by increasing the temperature, the emission decreases, which is promising for thermal regulation, thermal tagging, and labeling applications. Furthermore, we demonstrate numerically that the thermal modulating application can be realized in the proposed semiconductor metamaterial. We achieved 15.4% for the modulation depth and 5.14% for the amplitude modulation depth, which are great values. In general, the work has numerically proved that the thermo-optical design used has very good prospects for various negative differential thermo-optic emission technologies. Furthermore, this semiconductor-based metamaterial structure can develop a path in narrow-band thermo-optic modulating and sensing applications and the like in the future. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America