Terahertz wave manipulation with metamaterials based on metal and graphene

The terahertz (THz) technology provides with exciting possibilities for spectroscopy, food quality control, defense, communication and biomedical imaging [1]. Being relatively young (the massive exploitation of the THz range began only in the beginning of 1990-ies), the THz science demands for active and passive materials and devices. Metamaterials, metal-dielectric artificial composites, propose wide possibilities for achieving unconventional electromagnetic properties, not found in nature. Moreover, metamaterials constructed of graphene, a monolayer of carbon atoms, allow for tunable response.
In this presentation we overview our results on theory, fabrication and characterization of metal and graphene based metamaterials for the THz range. We show that the multiple layers of structured graphene can form a hyperbolic dispersion medium lens able to resolve the subwavelength features [2]. We analyze the limitations and demonstrate numerically and experimentally the chiral and nonchiral thin-film metamaterial based polarization converters [3–5] and graphene total absorbers for THz radiation [6].