Phase shift module

Terahertz radiation

Metamaterial

Optics

Physics

Physical chemistry

Chemistry

Materials science

Polarization (electrochemistry)

Phase (matter)

Optoelectronics

Quantum mechanics

Split-ring resonator

Insertion loss

Resonator

Optics Express

Metasurfaces are two dimensional arrays of artificial subwavelength resonators, which can manipulate the amplitude and phase profile of incident electromagnetic fields. To date, limited progress has been achieved in realizing reconfigurable phase control of incident waves using metasurfaces. Here, an active metasurface is presented, whose resonance frequency can be tuned by employing insulator to metal transition in vanadium dioxide. By virtue of the phase jump accompanied by the resonance frequency tuning, the proposed metasurface acts as a phase shifter at THz frequency. It is further demonstrated that by appropriately tailoring the anisotropy of the metasurface, the observed phase shift can be used to switch the transmitted polarization from circular to approximately linear. This work thus shows potential for reconfigurable phase and polarization control at THz frequencies using vanadium dioxide based frequency tunable metasurfaces.

Vanadium dioxide based frequency tunable metasurface filters for realizing reconfigurable terahertz optical phase and polarization control