Carbon-based ultrabroadband tunable terahertz metasurface absorber

Carbon-based materials, such as graphene and carbon nanotubes, have emerged as a transformative class of building blocks for state-of-the-art metamaterial devices due to their excellent flexibility, light weight, and tunability. In this work, a tunable carbon-based metal-free terahertz (THz) metasurface with ultrabroadband absorption is proposed, composed of alternating graphite and graphene patterns, where the Fermi level of graphene is adjusted by varying the applied voltage bias to achieve the tunable ultrabroadband absorption characteristics. In particular, when the Fermi level of graphene is 1 eV, the absorption coefficient exceeds 90% from 7.24 through 16.23 THz, and importantly, the absorption bandwidth reaches as much as 8.99 THz. In addition, it is polarization-insensitive to incident waves and maintains a high absorption rate at an incident angle of up to 50 deg. This carbon-based device enjoys higher absorption bandwidth, rates, and performance compared to conventional absorbers in the THz regime and can be potentially applied in various fields, including THz wave sensing, modulation, as well as wearable health care devices, and biomedicine detection.