All-Dielectric Tunable Terahertz Metagrating for Diffraction Control

Recently, tunable metagratings have attracted substantial attention in manipulating the diffraction of electro-magnetic waves with considerable flexibility, but they are usually limited to inherent ohmic loss due to the metal layers. The all-dielectric schemes can address this issue, but its design and optimization remain challenging in the terahertz regime, especially in the 6G communication window. In this work, an all-dielectric tunable terahertz metagrating is demonstrated in theoretical and experimental investigations. The metagrating operating in the 6G communication window bends the electromagnetic waves beam into the T-1 diffraction order by optimizing the unit cell. In the experiments, more than 72.46% of the transmitted energy is concentrated in the desired diffraction order for p-polarized light and more than 66.60% for s-polarized light, which agrees well with the theoretical design. The tunability by angular deflection is reported in this all-dielectric metagrating. Then, based on the all-dielectric metagrating arrays, a metalens with numerical aperture of NA = 0.39 at 0.14 THz is demonstrated. The subwavelength scale focal spot is obtained as 2.0 mm x 2.0 mm with the focusing distance of 117.8 mm. Imaging capability of the metalens is performed utilizing the transmission imaging manner. The measured and anticipated results are satisfactorily congruous with one another, which could validate our design. This work paves the way toward designing highly efficient and tunable devices with potential applications in terahertz communications, sensors, and super-resolution imaging.

Automated summary

In this work, an all-dielectric tunable terahertz metagrating is demonstrated, which can manipulate the diffraction of electromagnetic waves in the 6G communication window. Furthermore, a high-efficiency metalens is designed and implemented based on the all-dielectric metagrating, achieving subwavelength focusing and imaging capability.