A tunable hybrid graphene-metal metamaterial absorber for sensing in the THz regime

In this paper, a graphene-based metamaterial absorber is proposed and investigated numerically, in which the interaction between a split ring resonator (SRR) and graphene results in a high-Q absorption. To make a better understanding of the resonance mechanism, the electric and the magnetic fields, and the surface currents at the resonance frequency are investigated. In order to ease the analysis of the structure, an equivalent circuit model is introduced using the transmission line theory, and the accuracy of the proposed model is verified by the full-wave simulation. Finally, different aspects of the designed metamaterial are discussed as a potential label-free sensor for chemical and biomedical sensing. It is shown that by using this structure, a sensor with a sensitivity of 597 GHz/RIU can be achieved.