A 2 to 4 Graphene Metamaterial Decoder and Tetrahydrofuran Detection
Zongteng Li, Aijun Zhu, Weigang Hou, Xinghua Yang, L. J. Cheng, Cong Hu, Fei Qiao, Lanchang Xing, Rabi Mahapatra
Abstract
A terahertz (THz) graphene metamaterial decoder, for the first time, is presented which can achieve a 2–4 decoding function and can be used to detect the content of gaseous tetrahydrofuran (THF) in air. The characteristics of the decoder were simulated and optimized by using the finite integration time-domain (FITD) method. The performance of decoding and sensing of the device was investigated. When this device is used as a 2–4 decoder, the maximum modulation depth (MD) is 99.60%, the minimum extinction ratio (ER) is 12.63 dB, and the maximum insertion loss (IL) is 0.67 dB. When this device is used as a sensor for THF detection, the sensitivity (S) can be up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$39.90~\text {nm}\cdot \text {L}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>/mmol, along with a quality factor (Q) of 17.1 and a detection limit (DL) as low as 0.31 mmol/L. The results show that the performance of the device in both decoding and sensing functions is relatively good. Simultaneously, due to its insensitivity to the angle of incidence, this device has an anti-interference ability in complex environments. Therefore, this device possesses certain reference significance in decoding, detection, data communication, information anti-counterfeiting, and other related fields.