Design, simulation, fabrication, and characteristics of terahertz metamaterial devices

In recent years metamaterials have been extensively researched and show strong potential to improve many devices. Metamaterials offer significant advantages over conventional materials because their properties depend mainly on geometrical design rather than composition. This important property allows metamaterials to be geometrically scaled such as to operate in any desired spectral range. Specifically, implementation of metamaterials into devices targeted to operate in the terahertz regime could greatly improve fields such as chemistry, biology, security, and medicine. In this work, terahertz metamaterials have been studied and novel devices have been designed and demonstrated. In particular, this work is focused mainly on metamaterial structures designed to absorb incident radiation. These absorber devices show promise for use in areas such as imaging and interference reduction applications. Both narrow-band and broadband absorber devices have been designed using simulations and fabricated using standard photolithography and electron deposition techniques.