Electronically reconfigurable metal-on-silicon metamaterial

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2012-08-08

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Abstract

Reconfigurable metamaterial-based apertures can play a unique role in both imaging and in beam-forming applications, where current technology relies mostly on the fabrication and integration of large detector or antenna arrays. Here, we report the experimental demonstration of a voltage-controlled, silicon-based electromagnetic metamaterial operating in the W-band (75-110 GHz). In this composite semiconductor metamaterial, patterned gold metamaterial elements serve both to manage electromagnetic wave propagation while simultaneously acting as electrical Schottky contacts that control the local conductivity of the semiconductor substrate. The active device layers consist of a patterned metal on a 2-μm-thick n-doped silicon layer, adhesively bonded to a transparent Pyrex wafer. The transmittance of the composite metamaterial can be modulated over a given frequency band as a function of bias voltage. We demonstrate a quantitative understanding of the composite device through the application of numerical approaches that simultaneously treat the semiconductor junction physics as well as wave propagation. © 2012 American Physical Society.

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10.1103/PhysRevB.86.075112

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Urzhumov, Y, JS Lee, T Tyler, S Dhar, V Nguyen, NM Jokerst, P Schmalenberg, DR Smith, et al. (2012). Electronically reconfigurable metal-on-silicon metamaterial. Physical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials Physics, 86(7). p. 075112. 10.1103/PhysRevB.86.075112 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/7573.

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Scholars@Duke

Jokerst

Nan Marie Jokerst

J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Dr. Nan Marie Jokerst is the J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, and the Executive Director of the Duke Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility, a Duke shared cleanroom and characterization facility. She received her BS in Physics from Creighton University in 1982, and her MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1984 and 1989, respectively. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has served as an elected member of the IEEE LEOS Board of Governors, and as the VP for Conferences and as the VP Technical Affairs. She is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, and has served as Chair of the OSA Engineering Council. Her awards include an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, an IEEE Third Millenium Medal, the IEEE/HP Harriet B. Rigas Medal, and the Alumni in Academia Award for the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering. She currently serves on the National Academies Board on Global Science and Technology. She has published over 200 refereed journal and conference publications, and has 6 patents.

Smith

David R. Smith

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Dr. David R. Smith is currently the James B. Duke Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Duke University. He is also Director of the Center for Metamaterials and Integrated Plasmonics at Duke and holds the positions of Adjunct Associate Professor in the Physics Department at the University of California, San Diego, and Visiting Professor of Physics at Imperial College, London. Dr. Smith received his Ph.D. in 1994 in Physics from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Dr. Smith's research interests include the theory, simulation and characterization of unique electromagnetic structures, including photonic crystals and metamaterials.

Smith is best known for his theoretical and experimental work on electromagnetic metamaterials. Metamaterials are artificially structured materials, whose electromagnetic properties can be tailored and tuned in ways not easily accomplished with conventional materials. Smith has been at the forefront in the development of numerical methods to design and characterize metamaterials, and has also provided many of the key experiments that have helped to illustrate the potential that metamaterials offer. Smith and his colleagues at UCSD demonstrated the first left-handed (or negative index) metamaterial at microwave frequencies in 2000--a material that had been predicted theoretically more than thirty years prior by Russian physicist Victor Veselago. No naturally occurring material or compound with a negative index-of-refraction had ever been reported until this experiment. In 2001, Smith and colleagues followed up with a second experiment confirming one of Veselago's key conjectures: the 'reversal' of Snell's law. These two papers--the first published in Physical Review Letters and the second in Science--generated enormous interest throughout the community in the possibility of metamaterials to extend and augment the properties of conventional materials. Both papers have now been cited more than 3,000 times each.

Since those first metamaterial experiments, Smith has continued to study the fundamentals and potential applications of negative index media and metamaterials. In 2004, Smith began studying the potential of metamaterials as a means to produce novel gradient index media. By varying the index-of-refraction throughout a material, an entire class of optical elements (such as lenses) can be formed. Smith showed that metamaterials could access a much larger range of design space, since both the magnetic and the electric properties could be graded independently. Smith and colleagues demonstrated several versions of gradient index optics, an activity that continues in his lab today. The introduction of controlled spatial gradients in the electromagnetic properties of a metamaterial flows naturally into the broad concept of transformation optics - a new electromagnetic design approach proposed by Sir John Pendry in 2006. To illustrate of the novelty of this design approach, Pendry, Schurig and Smith suggested in 2006 that an 'invisibility cloak' could be realized by a metamaterial implementation of a transformation optical design. Later that same year, Smith's group at Duke University reported the demonstration of a transformation optical designed 'invisibility cloak' at microwave frequencies. The concept of transformation optics has since attracted the attention of the scientific community, and is now a rapidly emerging sub-discipline in the field.

Smith's work on transformation optics has been featured in nearly every major newspaper, including a cover story in USA Today, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and many more. Smith and his work on cloaking have also been featured on television news programs inlcuding The Today Show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC. Smith's work has also been highlighted in documentary programs on The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, The Science Channel, the BBC and others.

Please also see Prof. Smith's personal website at http://people.ee.duke.edu/~drsmith for the most frequent updates.


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