Planar metamaterials have been recently proposed for thin dielectric film sensing in the terahertz frequency range. Although the thickness of the dielectric film can be very small compared with the wavelength, the required area of sensed material is
still determined by the diffraction-limited spot size of the terahertz beam excitation. In this article, terahertz near-field sensing is utilized to reduce the spot size. By positioning the metamaterial sensing platform close to the sub-diffraction terahertz source, the number of excited resonators, and hence minimal film area, are significantly reduced. As an additional advantage, a reduction in the number of excited resonators decreases the inter-cell coupling strength, and consequently the resonance Q factor is remarkably increased. The experimental results show that the resonance Q factor is improved by 113%. Moreover, for a film with a thickness of lambda/375 the minimal area can be as small as 0.2lambda by 0.2lambda. The success of this work provides a platform for future metamaterial-based sensors for biomolecular detection.
In transmission-mode terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS), the thickness of a sample is a critical factor that determines an amount of the interaction between terahertz waves and bulk material. If the interaction length is too small, a change
in the transmitted signal is overwhelmed by fluctuations and noise in the system. In this case, the sample can no longer be detected. This article presents a criterion to determine the lower thickness boundary of a free-standing film that can still be detectable by free-space transmission-mode THz-TDS. The rigorous analysis yields a simple proportional relation between the sample optical length and the system SNR. The proposed criterion can help to decide whether an alternative terahertz thin-film sensing modality is necessary.
This Letter presents an investigation on the effects of mutual coupling in a metamaterial comprising two sets of electric-LC (ELC) resonators with different resonance frequencies. Through simulation and experiment, it is found that the two resonances
experience significant shifting and weakening as they become spectrally close. An equivalent circuit model suggests that inductive coupling among the two resonator sets is a primary cause of the change in the resonance properties. This study is fundamental to designing metamaterials with an extended bandwidth or spatially variable response.
A multichannel thin-film sensor is implemented from a set of microstrip-coupled split-ring resonators (SRRs) with different dimensions. Each SRR exhibits a unique high-Q resonance that is sensitive to the presence of a sample in a particular area. He
nce, this SRR-based sensor can function (i) to detect different samples simultaneously to increase the throughput or (ii) to characterise nominally identical samples at multiple frequencies to increase the sensor selectivity. The design principle is validated with simulation and measurement. Owing to the optimized design, sensing a low-permittivity film with a thickness as small as one thousandth of the operating wavelength is achievable.
Alternative designs to an electric-LC (ELC) resonator, which is a type of metamaterial inclusion, are presented in this article. Fitting the resonator with an interdigital capacitor (IDC) helps to increase the total capacitance of the structure. In e
ffect, its resonance frequency is shifted downwards. This implies a decreased overall resonator size with respect to its operating wavelength. As a result, the metamaterial, composed of an array of IDC-loaded ELC resonators with their collective electromagnetic response, possesses improved homogeneity and hence is less influenced by diffraction effects of individual cells. The impact of incorporating an IDC into ELC resonators in terms of the electrical size at resonance and other relevant properties are investigated through both simulation and experiment.
One source of disturbance in a pulsed T-ray signal is attributed to ambient water vapor. Water molecules in the gas phase selectively absorb T-rays at discrete frequencies corresponding to their molecular rotational transitions. This results in promi
nent resonances spread over the T-ray spectrum, and in the time domain the T-ray signal is observed as fluctuations after the main pulse. These effects are generally undesired, since they may mask critical spectroscopic data. So, ambient water vapor is commonly removed from the T-ray path by using a closed chamber during the measurement. Yet, in some applications a closed chamber is not applicable. This situation, therefore, motivates the need for another method to reduce these unwanted artifacts. This paper presents a study on a computational means to address the problem. Initially, a complex frequency response of water vapor is modeled from a spectroscopic catalog. Using a deconvolution technique, together with fine tuning of the strength of each resonance, parts of the water-vapor response are removed from a measured T-ray signal, with minimal signal distortion.
