Abstract
Ultra-wideband absorbers have been extensively used in wireless communications, energy harvesting, and stealth applications. Herein, with the combination of experimental and theoretical analyses, we develop a flexible ultra-wideband terahertz absorber based on vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (VACNTs). Measured results show that the proposed absorber is able to work efficiently within the entire THz region (e.g., 0.1-3.0 THz), with an average power absorptance of >98% at normal incidence. The absorption performance remains at a similar level over a wide range of incident angle up to 60°. More importantly, our devices can function normally, even after being bent up to 90° or after 300 bending cycles. The total thickness of the device is about 360 μm, which is only 1/8 of the wavelength for the lowest evaluated frequency of 0.1 THz. The new insight into the VACNT materials paves the way for applications such as radar cross-section reduction, electromagnetic interference shielding, and flexible sensing because of the simplicity, flexibility, ultra-wideband operation, and large-scale fabrication of the device.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 43671-43680 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue number | 46 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 23 Oct 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was partially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (grant no. 2018YFC0603301), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 61801185, 51902112). The authors thank Kejia Wang and Runsheng Xu at the Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics at HUST for their assistance in THz-TDS measurements.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2019 American Chemical Society.
Keywords
- absorption
- carbon nanotubes
- flexible
- terahertz
- ultra-wideband