Superconducting terahertz metamaterials
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
During the past ten years subwavelength metallic structures have enabled metamaterials exhibiting exotic physical properties that are not possible or difficult to realize using naturally occurring materials, This bottom-up metamaterial approach is particularly attractive in the terahertz (THz) frequency range, where the THz gap is inherently associated with the lack of materials with appropriate reponse. In fact THz metamaterial devices have accomplished unprecedented performance towards practical applications. In these devices, the key is to incorporate natural materials, e,g, semiconductors, as the metamaterial substrates or integration parts of metamaterial structures. The active or dynamic tunability of metamaterials is through the application of external stimuli such as temperature, photoexcitation, or electric field. to modify the capacitive gaps in split-ring resonators (SRRs), It becomes clear that we would not be able to do much on the metallic SRRs, i.e. the metal conductivity and therefore the inductance largely remain constant not affected by external stimuli. Recently, there has been increasing interest in superconducting metamaterials towards loss reduction. Significant Joule losses have often prevented resonant metal metamaterials from achieving proposed applications. particularly in the optical frequency range. At low temperatures, superconducting materials possess superior conductivity than metals at frequencies up to THz. and therefore it is expected that superconducting melamaterials will have a lower loss than metal metamatetials, More interestingly, superconductors exhibit tunable complex conductivity over a wide range of values through change of temperature and application of photoexcitation, electrical currents and magnetic fields. Therefore, we would expect correspondingly tunable metamaterials. which originate from the superconducting materials composing the metamaterial, in contrast to tuning the metamaterial embedded environment.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC52-06NA25396
- OSTI ID:
- 1025900
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-10-05290; LA-UR-10-5290; TRN: US201120%%870
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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