Flexible omega-ring metamaterial sensor with ultrahigh sensitivity in the terahertz region

Abstract

This article presents a dual-band tunable metamaterial sensor in the terahertz region, which has a high sensitivity and can work on curved surface with good flexibility. The proposed metamaterial sensor is composed of omega-ring arrays with two types of omega-shape structures fabricated on parylene-C thin substrates. An omega-I structure is developed from unit omega cells arranged along the same direction. Meanwhile, in order to investigate the effect of the unit cell direction on THz transmission, each unit cell is rotated by 90 degrees in sequence to configure omega-II structure. Compared to the omega-I structure, the omega-II structure achieves a 31.1% intensity change when only 4% length is changed and the strain change is around 1.3 x 10(-4). Moreover, the omega-II structure is insensitive to the polarization angles of incident waves, which will be beneficial for the potential application of the new flexible THz sensing technology.