Active Terahertz Polarization Converter Using a Liquid Crystal-Embedded Metal Mesh

We report a terahertz (THz) metamaterial consisting of a metal mesh layer with nematic liquid crystals (LCs). The metal mesh has subwavelength apertures that function as a bandpass filter in the THz spectral range. The LCs are embedded and aligned homogeneously in the apertures. The electromagnetic characteristics were calculated with a finite-difference time-domain method. The metamaterial converts the polarization of the THz wave during transmission and the thickness of the LC layer can be reduced by two orders of magnitude relative to the homogeneously aligned LC without the meta-structures. This increases the response speed to applied external fields. We also fabricated the metamaterial using a dielectric substrate with a metal mesh layer, a nematic LC, and a dielectric substrate with a polymeric alignment layer and investigated its polarization conversion using THz time-domain spectroscopy. The experimental results demonstrated that metal mesh structures with LCs are useful for active THz polarization converters.