Versatile polarization manipulation in vanadium dioxide-integrated terahertz metamaterial

Broadband and switchable versatile polarization metamaterial is crucial in the applications of imaging, sensing and communication, especially in the terahertz frequency. Here, we investigated versatile polarization manipulation in a hybrid terahertz metamaterial with bilayer rectangular rods and a complementary vanadium dioxide (VO2) layer. The VO2 phase transition enables a flexible switching from dual-band asymmetric transmission to dual-band reflective half-wave plate. The full width half maximum (FWHM) bandwidths of dual-band asymmetric transmission are 0.77 and 0.21 THz, respectively. The polarization conversion ratio (PCR) of the reflective metamaterial is over 0.9 in the frequency ranges of 1.01-1.17 THz and 1.47-1.95 THz. Angular dependences of multiple polarization properties are studied. The proposed switchable polarization metamaterial is important to the development of multifunctional polarization devices and multichannel polarization detection. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

This study investigates versatile polarization manipulation in a hybrid terahertz metamaterial consisting of bilayer rectangular rods and a complementary vanadium dioxide (VO2) layer. The VO2 phase transition enables flexible switching from dual-band asymmetric transmission to dual-band reflective half-wave plate, with broadband polarization conversion. The findings are important for the development of multifunctional polarization devices and multichannel polarization detection.