Electrically controllable graphene hybridized metasurface. Image adapted from Science (Perspective) on our paper published in Nature Materials (2012)
As most metamaterials are fashioned in a two-dimensional platform (i.e., metasurfaces), a natural choice of materials for the active control is the two-dimensional materials, such as graphene and TMDCs. With this picture in mind, we proposed a structure consisting of a two-dimensional array of capacitively-coupled meta-atoms hybridized with gated graphene. The exotic electrical and optical properties of graphene, when enhanced by the strong capacitive response of meta-atoms, lead to a very strong interaction between massless Dirac fermions and photons such that persistent switching and fast linear modulation of low-energy photons are made possible in the extreme subwavelength-scale thickness (below λ/1,000,000).
Key achievements: Proposal on the hybridization of strong capacitively-coupled meta-atom structures with gated-graphene and its application as an electrically-controllable metadevice (S. H. Lee et al., Nature Materials, 2012, W. Y. Kim et al., Nature Communications, 2016, T. -T. Kim, Science Advances, 2017),