Direct-tuning methods for semiconductor metamaterials

Among various tunable optical devices, tunable metamaterials have exhibited their excellent ability to dynamically manipulate lights in an efficient manner. However, for unchangeable optical properties of metals, electromagnetic resonances of popular metallic metamaterials are usually tuned indirectly by varying the properties or structures of substrates around the resonant unit cells, and the tuning of metallic metamaterials has significantly low efficiency. In this paper, a direct-tuning method for semiconductor metamaterials is proposed. The resonance strength and resonance frequencies of the metamaterials can be significantly tuned by controlling free carriers’ distributions in unit cells under an applied voltage. This direct-tuning method has been verified in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional semiconductor metamaterials. In principle, the method allows for simplifying the structure of tunable metamaterials and opens the path to applications in ultrathin, linearly-tunable, and on-chip integrated optical components (e.g., tunable ultrathin lenses, nanoscale spatial light modulators and optical cavities with resonance modes switchable).