THz Metamaterial Sensitivity Enhancement by Reduction of Substrate’s Fabry–Pérot Oscillations Using Back Plates as an Optical De-Coupler

This work presents a new method for the enhancement of sensitivity in Terahertz (THz) spectroscopy on metamaterial (MM) in terms of its resonance frequency shift (Δ F ), by attaching the dielectric back plate to the MM’s silicon (Si) wafer. The dielectric back plates are designed to minimize the Fresnel reflections at the backside of the substrate, identical to a broadband antireflective (AR) plate tailored for THz. Utilizing broadband AR technology, we demonstrate the concept of decoupling MM resonance from the substrate’s Fabry–Pérot (FP) oscillations. This is done by effectively coupling the THz light out of the high-permittivity substrate, resulting in the improved quality factor of the MM resonance and overall plasmonic enhancement on the metasurface. The back plate acts as a surface plasmonic enhancer to the THz MM by increasing the field intensity on the front metasurface, leading to enhancement of dielectric response (MM’s Δ F ). This makes the MM resonance ultrasensitive to the minor changes of particle size/concentration under test spread on the metasurface, contributing to enhanced resonance Δ F . The plate also makes the Si substrate optically lossless, enabling the full effect of MM resonance shift and increasing the resonance Δ F by 8-fold compared with MM’s fabricated on conventional Si substrates. This research is backed-up with system-level CST simulations and experimental THz impedance spectroscopy of the MM. This method and chip structure is CMOS compatible having potential applications for any resonant MM fabricated on a substrate aimed to maximize dielectric sensitivity for biosensing and nanoparticle THz spectroscopy.