Active control of electromagnetically induced transparency based on terahertz hybrid metal-graphene metamaterials for slow light applications

Abstract

Recently, the dynamically controlled electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) metamaterials have been widely used in the slow light effect field to enhance the light-matter interactions and nonlinear effects, which has aroused the great attraction of many researchers. The emergence of two-dimensional materials has pushed this research to a new research hot again. Therefore, a terahertz hybrid metal-graphene metamaterial, consisting of a bi-layer metallic EIT metamaterial, an unpatterned monolayer graphene, and an encapsulated ion-gel layer, was proposed to actively control the EIT resonance. In this structure, the transparency peak of the bi-layer metallic EIT metamaterial can realize on-to-off switch through shifting the Fermi energy of graphene covering onto the dark mode resonators. Theoretical analysis and surface current distributions reveal that the active modulation can be attributed to the increasing damping rate of the dark mode caused by the actively controllable conductivity of the graphene. In addition, the active control of the group delay in the hybrid metamaterial is also demonstrated for the slow-light applications. Therefore, this work provides an alternative way to design compact slow-light devices for future terahertz wireless communications.