Carbon nanotube attached subwavelength grating for broadband terahertz polarization conversion and dispersion control

Carbon nanotube (CNT), as a recently emerged newfangled nanomaterial, has been applied in terahertz (THz) polarizer due to its anisotropic hyper-ordered orientation. Herein, we simply adhere two orthogonal CNT sheets to the both sides of dielectric subwavelength grating to form a compound structure (i.e. CNT@Grating). Due to the subwavelength integration and cavity modes, the CNT@Grating presents local resonances between two CNT sheets, which greatly enhances the polarization rotation and expands the bandwidth. Compared with the large phase shift dispersion of single subwavelength grating, its phase shift dispersion and impedance can be manipulated by adjusting the layer number of CNT, and finally a broadband close zero dispersion from 0.4 to 0.95 THz has been obtained, which leads to a broadband THz polarization conversion. This work provides a new design idea towards practical applications for THz broadband polarization conversion and dispersion control. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.