Design and Fabrication of Substrate-Free Au/SiNx/Au Metafilm for THz Sensing Application

Abstract

A method of designing and fabricating substrate-free Au/SiN <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">x</sub> /Au metafilms as the terahertz (THz) absorber of metamaterial focal plane arrays (MFPA) is reported. The absorption was investigated by the finite integration method simulation and new explicit functions. The substrate-free structure was well fabricated by microelectromechanical system (MEMS) technology. The frequency-dependent absorption of MFPA was measured by THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) system. It exhibits an extremely high absorptance of 98.7% at 1.36 THz. The absorption characteristic shows an asymmetric profile, which is well fitted with an Asymmetric Double Sigmoidal (Asym2sig) model. Our results show that the Au/SiN <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">x</sub> /Au metafilms have potential in optical readout THz real-time imaging, and highly sensitive sensing applications.