Abstract Electromagnetic metamaterials, which are a major type of artificially engineered materials, have boosted the development of optical and photonic devices due to their unprecedented and controllable effective properties, including electric permittivity and magnetic permeability. Metamaterials consist of arrays of subwavelength unit cells, which are also known as meta-atoms. Importantly, the effective properties of metamaterials are mainly determined by the geometry of the constituting subwavelength unit cells rather than their chemical composition, enabling versatile designs of their electromagnetic properties. Recent research has mainly focused on reconfigurable, tunable, and nonlinear metamaterials towards the development of metamaterial devices, namely, metadevices, via integrating actuation mechanisms and quantum materials with meta-atoms. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), or microsystems, provide powerful platforms for the manipulation of the effective properties of metamaterials and the integration of abundant functions with metamaterials. In this review, we will introduce the fundamentals of metamaterials, approaches to integrate MEMS with metamaterials, functional metadevices from the synergy, and outlooks for metamaterial-enabled photonic devices.
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Functional Metamaterial Devices Enabled by Microsystems
Metamaterials represent a class of artificially engineered materials, which exhibit unprecedented properties enabled by their constituent subwavelength unit cells. The effective properties of metamaterials may be dynamically controlled by driving unit cells via different approaches, including photo-doping, electrical gating, or mechanical actuation. With such dynamical tuning mechanisms, the propagation modality of electromagnetic waves may be modulated to achieve functional devices for modulation, beam steering, focusing, and polarization control, among others. In addition, the perfect absorption and near field effect enabled by metamaterials may be used in electromagnetic detectors across the frequency spectrum. Microsystem technology provides a platform to achieve functional metamaterial devices by covering all requisite processes, including fabrication, packaging, and system integration. We report our progress in constructing functional devices by integrating metamaterials with microsystems technology and discuss remaining challenges and the future direction of metamaterial devices.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1810252
- PAR ID:
- 10292015
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2020 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 26.2.1 to 26.2.4
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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