Abstract
Additive manufacturing is a promising tool for the rapid prototyping of terahertz metamaterials at low-cost. In this letter, a terahertz metamaterial is fabricated using a microplotter system on a flexible polyimide film. The limits of the rapid prototyping technique is investigated both experimentally and numerically in order to determine the spectral range accessible by the fabricated metamaterials. Here, the metamaterial is composed of four arrays of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) antennas exhibiting a Fabry Perot resonance at frequencies from 0.25 to 0.8 THz. From a structural analysis of the printed antennas, we determined that the printing resolution is limited to about 5 μm. The arrays are analyzed by terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS). The good agreement between THz-TDS measurements and numerical simulations showed that the microplotter system can be used for rapid prototyping by adjusting a limited number of fabrication parameters.
Highlights
Metamaterials have artificial optical properties that can be tailored to design impaired terahertz sources, detectors [1] and components [2,3,4]
For gratings 1 and 2, a good agreement between the three plots is obtained, showing that the resonances are correctly predicted by the model, and that the reproducibility of the microplotter is fair enough to neglect the dispersion of the size of the antennas
We demonstrated the fabrication of MIM metamaterials using a microplotter system on a flexible polyimide film in a single fabrication run
Summary
Metamaterials have artificial optical properties that can be tailored to design impaired terahertz sources, detectors [1] and components [2,3,4]. The sub-wavelength structures composing planar terahertz metamaterials are currently fabricated by photolithography. This technique suffers from time-consuming processing steps, high capital expensures, and requires photomasks everytime the metamaterial design is changed [5]. The few microns resolution required to produce terahertz metamaterials can be reached by various rapid prototyping techniques [6]. Compared to other printing techniques, the microplotter has two advantages: (i) viscous ink up to 450 cP can be ejected, and (ii) a reduced set of parameters has to be adjusted depending on the ink viscosity and the required resolution: the glass tip inner diameter (typically between 1 and 60 μm) and the voltage amplitude of the ultrasonic excitation (between 0 and 3 V). The spectral responses of the metasurfaces are measured by THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) and compared with numerical simulations
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