Leveraging of MEMS Technologies for Optical Metamaterials Applications

Tunable metamaterial devices have experienced explosive growth in the past decades, driving the traditional electromagnetic (EM) devices to evolve into diversified functionalities by manipulating EM properties such as amplitude, frequency, phase, polarization, and propagation direction. However, one of the bottlenecks of these rapidly developed metamaterials technologies is limited tunability caused by the intrinsic frequency-dependent property of exotic tunable material. To overcome such limitation, the microelectromechanical system (MEMS) enabling micro/nanoscale manipulation is developed to actively control meta-atom in terahertz and infrared region, which brings frequency-scalable tunability and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor-compatible functional meta-devices. Beyond tunability, novel chemical sensing platforms of molecular identification and dynamic monitoring of the biochemical process can be achieved by integrating micro/nanofluidics channels with metamaterial resonators. Additionally, incorporating metamaterial absorbers with MEMS resonators brings another research interest in MEMS zero-power devices and radiation sensors. Furthermore, moving from 2D metasurfaces to 3D metamaterials, enhanced EM properties like novel resonance mode, giant chirality, and 3D manipulation reinforce the application in biochemical and physical sensors as well as functional meta-devices, paving the way to realize multi-functional sensing and signal processing on a hybrid smart-sensor microsystem for booming healthcare, environmental monitoring, and the Internet of Things applications.