Tailoring polarization and magnetization of absorbing terahertz metamaterials using a cut-wire sandwich structure

The permittivity and permeability of a cut-wire sandwich structure can be controlled by laterally shifting the upper and lower layers. The use of this process for designing specific application-oriented devices may lack clear-cut guidelines because the lateral misalignment will significantly change the permittivity and permeability simultaneously. Therefore, in this work, we designed, fabricated and characterized a cut-wire sandwich device capable of tailoring the polarization and magnetization separately, thereby providing a promising recipe for achieving specific application objectives, such as a high-performance absorber. Accumulated charges effectively provided the polarization at the edge of cut-wires, and the surface current density on the cut-wires at top and bottom layers effectively generated the magnetization. By controlling and optimizing the geometrical configurations of the entire sandwich device (without lateral misalignment), the impedance could be matched to that of free space while generating a large imaginary part in the refractive index. This work characterizes the absorption performance of such sandwich structures in the terahertz regime. This mechanism could be further extended to other metamaterial devices in the terahertz and other frequency ranges because polarization and magnetization can now be selectively controlled in a straightforward manner.