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A terahertz metamaterial with unnaturally high refractive index

Nature volume 470, pages 369–373 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Controlling the electromagnetic properties of materials, going beyond the limit that is attainable with naturally existing substances, has become a reality with the advent of metamaterials1,2,3. The range of various structured artificial ‘atoms’ has promised a vast variety of otherwise unexpected physical phenomena3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17, among which the experimental realization of a negative refractive index has been one of the main foci thus far. Expanding the refractive index into a high positive regime will complete the spectrum of achievable refractive index and provide more design flexibility for transformation optics9,10,11,12,13,14. Naturally existing transparent materials possess small positive indices of refraction, except for a few semiconductors and insulators, such as lead sulphide or strontium titanate, that exhibit a rather high peak refractive index at mid- and far-infrared frequencies18. Previous approaches using metamaterials were not successful in realizing broadband high refractive indices19,20,21. A broadband high-refractive-index metamaterial structure was theoretically investigated only recently22, but the proposed structure does not lend itself to easy implementation. Here we demonstrate that a broadband, extremely high index of refraction can be realized from large-area, free-standing, flexible terahertz metamaterials composed of strongly coupled unit cells. By drastically increasing the effective permittivity through strong capacitive coupling and decreasing the diamagnetic response with a thin metallic structure in the unit cell, a peak refractive index of 38.6 along with a low-frequency quasi-static value of over 20 were experimentally realized for a single-layer terahertz metamaterial, while maintaining low losses. As a natural extension of these single-layer metamaterials, we fabricated quasi-three-dimensional high-refractive-index metamaterials, and obtained a maximum bulk refractive index of 33.2 along with a value of around 8 at the quasi-static limit.

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Figure 1: Schematic view of the high-index metamaterials and images of the fabricated metamaterials.
Figure 2: Extracted effective permittivity, permeability, refractive index and figure of merit for high-index metamaterials.
Figure 3: Transmission/reflection spectra of multilayer metamaterials and the band structure.
Figure 4: Effective refractive index and peak index frequency as a function of the gap width for a single-layer metamaterial.

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Acknowledgements

We thank B. Kang for help in the fabrication of micrometre-gap metamaterials, J. S. Chang for proofreading the manuscript before submission, and D. S. Kim for discussions. This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea grants funded by the Korean government (numbers 2009-0069459, 2008-0062235 and 2010-0012058). K.-Y.K. acknowledges support by the IT Research and Development programme of MKE/KEIT (number 2006-S-005-04). Y.-H.L. acknowledges support from the National Research Foundation of Korea (number 2007-0093863) and N.P. acknowledges support from National Research Foundation (numbers GRL K20815000003 and 2010-0001859), funded by the Korean government.

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Author notes

  1. Muhan Choi

    Present address: Present address: Convergence Components and Materials Research Laboratory, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Daejeon 305-700, South Korea.,

  2. Muhan Choi and Seung Hoon Lee: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 305-751, South Korea,

    Muhan Choi, Seung Hoon Lee, Yushin Kim & Bumki Min

  2. Convergence Components and Materials Research Laboratory, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Daejeon 305-700, South Korea ,

    Seung Beom Kang, Min Hwan Kwak & Kwang-Young Kang

  3. Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon 305-751, South Korea,

    Jonghwa Shin & Yong-Hee Lee

  4. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-744, South Korea

    Namkyoo Park

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Contributions

M.C. and Y.K. performed the numerical simulations. S.H.L. fabricated micro/nano-gap metamaterial samples. S.B.K., M.H.K. and K.-Y.K. conducted THz-TDs experiments. M.C., S.H.L., Y.K., J.S. and B.M. analysed numerical and experimental data. M.C., S.H.L., Y.K., J.S., Y.-H.L., N.P. and B.M. discussed the results. M.C., J.S., Y.-H.L., N.P. and B.M. wrote the manuscript. B.M. led the overall direction of the project.

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Correspondence to Bumki Min.

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Supplementary Information

The file contains Supplementary Text and Data 1-8, Supplementary Figures 1-8 with legends and additional references. (PDF 1815 kb)

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Choi, M., Lee, S., Kim, Y. et al. A terahertz metamaterial with unnaturally high refractive index. Nature 470, 369–373 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09776

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