Abstract

Vanadium dioxide (VO₂) is a well-known material that undergoes insulator-to-metal phase transition near room temperature. Since the conductivity of VO₂ changes several orders of magnitude in the terahertz (THz) spectral range during the phase transition, VO₂-based active metamaterials have been extensively studied. Experimentally, it is reported that the metal nanostructures on the VO₂ thin film lowers the critical temperature significantly compared to the bare film. Here, we theoretically studied such early transition phenomena by developing an analytical model. Unlike experimental work that only measures transmission, we calculate the reflection and absorption and demonstrate that the role of absorption is quite different for bare and patterned samples; the absorption gradually increases for bare film during the phase transition, while an absorption peak is observed at the critical temperature for the metamaterials. In addition, we also discuss the gap width and VO₂ thickness effects on the transition temperatures.

© 2022 Optical Society of Korea

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