Directional conversion of a THz propagating wave into surface waves in deformable metagratings

Controllable conversion between propagating light waves and surface waves (SWs) has recently attracted significant research interests. This paper demonstrates, via numerical simulation, for the first time all-dielectric SW converters that possess a tunable and directional SW conversion efficiency. The SW converters contain multiple metagratings of Si pillars embedded in a deformable substrate. In the analysis, an infinitely large, bi-periodic metagrating under the illumination of linearly polarized light is considered first. The SW conversion efficiency of this metagrating can be modulated between 4.3% and 51.0% for incident light frequency at 0.8 THz by stretching the deformable substrate along the direction of SW propagation. Subsequently, two SW converters under circularly polarized light illumination are analyzed, where a similar level of efficiency modulation is retained in finite-sized metagratings. In these converters, only the metagrating channels along the stretch direction have a strong SW conversion efficiency, which can reach 40.4% after normalization against the effective grating area. The directivity, a parameter defined here to reveal the energy contrast among the output channels, reaches 38.6 in one of the converters. Due to its high tunability, high directivity and compact size, the SW converters may be used as tunable optical sensors and light couplers in the THz regime.