# Electrically Tunable Metasurface Perfect Absorbers for Ultrathin Mid-Infrared Optical Modulators

Article · Yu Qin Yao, Raji Shankar, Mikhail A. Kats, Yi Song, Jing Kong, Marko Lončar, Federico Capasso

- Archive id: doi:10.1021/nl503104n
- Published: 2014-10-13
- Venue: Nano Letters
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/nl503104n
- PMID: 25310847
- Citations: 830
- Source URL: https://doi.org/10.1021/nl503104n
- Provenance: openalex

## Abstract

Dynamically reconfigurable metasurfaces open up unprecedented opportunities in applications such as high capacity communications, dynamic beam shaping, hyperspectral imaging, and adaptive optics. The realization of high performance metasurface-based devices remains a great challenge due to very limited tuning ranges and modulation depths. Here we show that a widely tunable metasurface composed of optical antennas on graphene can be incorporated into a subwavelength-thick optical cavity to create an electrically tunable perfect absorber. By switching the absorber in and out of the critical coupling condition via the gate voltage applied on graphene, a modulation depth of up to 100% can be achieved. In particular, we demonstrated ultrathin (thickness \< λ0/10) high speed (up to 20 GHz) optical modulators over a broad wavelength range (5-7 μm). The operating wavelength can be scaled from the near-infrared to the terahertz by simply tailoring the metasurface and cavity dimensions.

_Abstract reproduced under CC-BY (publisher license, via OpenAlex)._

Topics: [Metamaterials, Nanophotonics & Integrated Photonics](https://space-kitty.com/topics/metamaterials-photonics)

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