A MEMS Reconfigurable Terahertz Metamaterial Absorber Based on The Tunable Air Gap

This paper reports a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) based reconfigurable terahertz (THz) metamaterial absorber enabled by changing the air gap between the dipole resonator array and the ground plane. By combining electrostatic MEMS actuators and metamaterials, our device can realize high quality factor resonance and giant modulation depth in the terahertz regime. We proposed an equivalent circuit model (ECM) to explain the observed resonance behavior. The device was fabricated by combination of the surface and bulk-micromachining processes. The MEMS reconfigurable metamaterial absorber demonstrated may potentiate various applications, such as THz spatial light modulators and biological/chemical sensors.