Tunable meta-atom using liquid metal embedded in stretchable polymer

Journal Article · Tue Jul 07 00:00:00 EDT 2015 · Journal of Applied Physics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4926417· OSTI ID:22489447

Liu, Peng; Yang, Siming; Wang, Qiugu; Jiang, Huawei; Song, Jiming; Dong, Liang ^[1]; Jain, Aditya ^[1]; Koschny, Thomas; Soukoulis, Costas M. ^[2]

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1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011 (United States)
2. Ames Laboratory, U.S. DOE and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa 50011 (United States)

Reconfigurable metamaterials have great potential to alleviate complications involved in using passive metamaterials to realize emerging electromagnetic functions, such as dynamical filtering, sensing, and cloaking. This paper presents a new type of tunable meta-atoms in the X-band frequency range (8–12 GHz) toward reconfigurable metamaterials. The meta-atom is made of all flexible materials compliant to the surface of an interaction object. It uses a liquid metal-based split-ring resonator as its core constituent embedded in a highly flexible elastomer. We demonstrate that simple mechanical stretching of the meta-atom can lead to the great flexibility in reconfiguring its resonance frequency continuously over more than 70% of the X-band frequency range. The presented meta-atom technique provides a simple approach to dynamically tune response characteristics of metamaterials over a broad frequency range.

• OSTI ID: 22489447
• Journal Information: Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 118, Issue 1; Other Information: (c) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0021-8979
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS
GENERAL PHYSICS
ATOMS
FILTERS
GHZ RANGE
INTERACTIONS
LIQUID METALS
METAMATERIALS
POLYMERS
RESONANCE
SPLIT-RING RESONATORS
SURFACES