On February 26th, the academic paper "Terahertz Chiral Metamaterials Enabled by Textile Manufacturing" was published online at Advanced Materials, the international top journal in the field of Materials. The team led by Professor Wang Shengxiang from the School of Electronics and Electrical Engineering of WTU has made important progress in the field of artificial metamaterials for fabric. The research team members use traditional textile technology combined with artificial micro-nano structure to make new optoelectronic equipment.
Abstract
Easy-to-fabricate, large-area, and inexpensive microstructures that realize control of the polarization of terahertz (THz) radiation are of fundamental importance to the development of the field of THz wave photonics. However, due to the lack of natural materials which can facilitate strong THz radiation-matter interactions, THz polarization components remain an undeveloped technology. Strong resonance-based responses offered by THz metamaterials have led to the recent development of THz metadevices, whereas, for polarization control devices, micrometer-scale fabrication techniques including aligned photolithography are generally required to create multilayer microstructures. In this work, leveraging a two-step textile manufacturing approach, a chiral metamaterial capable of exhibiting strong chiroptical responses at THz frequencies is demonstrated. Chiral-selective transmission and pronounced optical activity are experimentally observed. In sharp contrast to smart clothing related devices (e.g., textile antennas), the investigated chiral metamaterials gain their THz properties directly from the yarn-twisting enabled micro-helical strings. We envision that the interplay between meta-atom designs and textile manufacturing technology will lead to a new family of metadevices for complete control over the phase, amplitude, and polarization of THz radiation.
In recent years, Professor Wang Shengxiang's team has made a series of innovative achievements in realizing multi-dimensional light field manipulation with artificial micro-nano structures. Lots of research results were published at Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, Applied Physics Letters, Optics Express, APL Materials, Journal of Applied Physics, and Scientific Reports.
