Analysis of an electrically reconfigurable metasurface for manipulating polarization of near-infrared light

Abstract

Integrating plasmonic metasurfaces with transparent conductive oxide (TCO) materials provides a new, to the best of our knowledge, opportunity to dynamically manipulate all degrees of freedom of light beams. Applying external stimuli to TCOs changes the plasmonic response of the nanostructure as a result of establishing an inhomogeneous optical property with deeply subwavelength films of epsilon-near-zero media, which is a challenge for better theoretical understanding of the dynamical tuning functionality. In this paper, we propose a dynamically reconfigarable reflective metasurface with the capability of electrical manipulation of the polarization state of near-infrared light. The structure behavior is investigated by numerical analysis and described based on the coupled-mode theory concept using the parameters of resonance wavelength, absorption, and radiation quality factors, altered by an external voltage. Variation of the applied bias voltage from -0.7 to 4.2 V for p-polarized light leads to a wide range of absorption quality factors from 43 to two. This change causes a dramatic decrease in the equivalent surface impedance of the metasurface in the ratio 4.9:0.2, which may pave the way to tailor polarization-manipulating functions such as circular-to-linear polarization conversion and cross-polarization conversion. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America