Metasurfaces, the two-dimensional counterpart of metamaterials, have caught great attention thanks to their powerful capabilities on manipulation of electromagnetic waves. Recent times have seen the emergence of a variety of metasurfaces exhibiting not only countless functionalities, but also a reconfigurable response. Additionally, digital or coding metasurfaces have revolutionized the field by describing the device as a matrix of discrete building block states, thus drawing clear parallelisms with information theory and opening new ways to model, compose, and (re)program advanced metasurfaces. This paper joins the reconfigurable and digital approaches, and presents a metasurface that leverages the tunability of graphene to perform beam steering at terahertz frequencies. A comprehensive design methodology is presented encompassing technological, unit cell design, digital metamaterial synthesis, and programmability aspects. By setting up and dynamically adjusting a phase gradient along the metasurface plane, the resulting device achieves beam steering at all practical directions. The proposed design is studied through analytical models and validated numerically, showing beam widths and steering errors well below 10 o and 5% in most cases. Finally, design guidelines are extracted through a scalability analysis involving the metasurface size and number of unit cell states.

Recent emergence of metasurfaces has enabled the development of ultra-thin flat optical components through different wavefront shaping techniques at various wavelengths. However, due to the non-adaptive nature of conventional metasurfaces, the focal point of the resulting optics needs to be fixed at the design stage, thus severely limiting its reconfigurability and applicability. In this paper, we aim to overcome such constraint by presenting a flat reflective component that can be reprogrammed to focus terahertz waves at a desired point in the near-field region. To this end, we first propose a graphene-based unit cell with phase reconfigurability, and then employ the coding metasurface approach to draw the phase profile required to set the focus on the target point. Our results show that the proposed component can operate close to the diffraction limit with high focusing range and low focusing error. We also demonstrate that, through appropriate automation, the reprogrammability of the metamirror could be leveraged to develop compact terahertz scanning and imaging systems, as well as novel reconfigurable components for terahertz wireless communications.

We present a new instrumentation and calibration procedure for terahertz time-domain spectroscopic ellipsometry (THz-TDSE) that is a newly established characterization technique. The experimental setup is capable of providing arbitrary angle of incidence in the range of 15°–85° in the reflection geometry, and with no need for realignment. The setup is also configurable easily into transmission geometry. For this setup, we successfully used hollow core photonic band gap fiber with no pre-chirping in order to deliver a femtosecond laser into a THz photoconductive antenna detector, which is the first demonstration of this kind. The proposed calibration scheme can compensate for the non-ideality of the polarization response of the THz photoconductive antenna detector as well as that of wire grid polarizers used in the setup. In the calibration scheme, the ellipsometric parameters are obtained through a regression algorithm which we have adapted from the conventional regression calibration method developed for rotating element optical ellipsometers, and used here for the first time for THz-TDSE. As a proof-of-principle demonstration, results are presented for a high resistivity silicon substrate as well as an opaque Si substrate with a high phosphorus concentration. We also demonstrate the capacity to measure a few micron thick grown thermal oxide on top of Si. Each sample was characterized by THz-TDSE in reflection geometry with different angle of incidence.

An efficient terahertz (THz) photoconductive antenna (PCA), as a major constituent for the generation or detection of THz waves, plays an essential role in bridging microwave-to-photonic gaps. Here, we propose an impressive approach comprising the use of arrayed zinc oxide nanorods (ZnO NRs) as an optical nanoantenna over an anti-reflective layer (silicon nitride) in the antenna gap to boost the photocurrent and consequently the THz signal. The numerical approach applied in investigating the optical behavior of the structure, demonstrates a significant field enhancement within the LT-GaAs layer due to the optical antenna performing simultaneously as a concentrator and an antireflector which behaves as a graded-refractive index layer. ZnO NRs have been fabricated on the PCA gap using the hydrothermal method as a simple, low cost and production compatible fabrication method compared to other complex methods used for the optical nanoantennas. Compared to the conventional PCA with a traditional antireflection coating, the measured THz power by time domain spectroscopy (TDS) is increased more than 4 times on average over the 0.1–1.2 THz range.

A hybrid numerical simulation method is presented to model and analyze integrated terahertz (THz) photomixer antennas. The proposed computational method combines an optoelectronic solver and a full-wave electromagnetic solver to rigorously model continuous wave (CW) THz photomixer sources. In this hybrid computational approach, the photomixer source is modeled in a rigorous manner without any approximation. The optoelectronic solver is used to find absorbed optical intensity and optical carrier generation rate inside the fast photoconductive region through solving an optical scattering problem. Then, the equations governing the charge carrier transport inside the photoconductor are solved to give THz photo-current by considering realistic material parameters. Finally, through a full-wave electromagnetic solver, and using calculated photo-current from the optoelectronic simulator, antenna parameters and radiated THz power are obtained. Using the proposed hybrid simulation method the effects of photomixer parameters on the THz photo-current and radiated power is rigorously investigated for several geometries. Moreover, results of a parametric study on various factors such as carrier lifetime of material, incident optical power density, applied bias voltage, THz beat frequency, and the gap size are presented. The method can be used for accurate design refinement at pre-fabrication stage.

Graphene plasmonic antennas possess two significant features that render them appealing for short-range wireless communications, notably, inherent tunability and miniaturization due to the unique frequency dispersion of graphene and its support for surface plasmon waves in the terahertz band. In this letter, dipole-like antennas using few-layer graphene are proposed to achieve a better trade-off between miniaturization and radiation efficiency than current monolayer graphene antennas. The characteristics of few-layer graphene antennas are evaluated and then compared with those of antennas based on monolayer graphene and graphene stacks, which could also provide such improvements. To this end, first, the propagation properties of one-dimensional and two-dimensional plasmonic waveguides based on the aforementioned graphene structures are obtained by transfer matrix theory and finite-element simulation, respectively. Second, the antennas are investigated as three-dimensional structures using a full-wave solver. Results show that the highest radiation efficiency among the compared designs is achieved with the few-layer graphene, while the highest miniaturization is obtained with the even mode of the graphene stack antenna.