Coupleurs fibres-métasurfaces aux fréquences THz

Metamaterials are a class of arficial materials where the electromagnetic properties can be tailored during the design process. Currently demonstrated properties are varied, ranging from frequency filters to enhancement of quentum effects such as photon spin Hall effect. While these materials are mastered from a theoretical point of view, their fabrication is much more complicated. It is generally accepted that metamaterial elements must be under the effective medium limit ( < λ/10). Moreover, assembly of a 3D periodical system becomes much more complicated for small elements. For this reason, metamaterials are usually printed in 2D, on a surface, which are called metasurfaces. Generally, these are produced for the THz frequencies (∼ 1012 Hz) or lower to have a large wavelength and thus easy fabrication. Working at THz frequencies also carries additional problems. Absorption in traditional optical mediums is typically large (for exemple, BK7 glass has losses of 20 dB / cm) and powers supplied by THz sources are generally weak ( 100 μW for a THz-TDS standard source). Metasurfaces can thus play an important role by replacing traditional mediums. Moreover, we can use the resonant properties of metamaterials to produce sensors and other devices. Currently, the metasurfaces are used in conjuction with a free-space beam instead of a typical waveguide, which may be problematic when implementing devices. A simple solution to this problem is to use the metamaterial as a standard coupler by placing a waveguide above the metasurface. As stated before, we generally consider metasurfaces as effective mediums, where the permittivity is insensitive to the angle of the incident beam. However, a large amount of publications on this subject shows that this is not respected. This can have a huge impact on properties of a coupler based on such a material. First, modelisation is not a simple 2D mode calculation with a simple expression for permittivity. Second, contra-directional coupling becomes permitted due to wavevector becoming close to the periodicity. This work shows modelisation of such a fiber-metasurface coupler while taking account of these problems, with two publications on the subject. The first article modelises the coupler using a 400 μm diameter subwavelength step-index fiber coupled to a metasurface made of SRR on a 700 μm thick fused silica substrate. Frequencies are around 300 GHz (λ = 1000 μm). We obtain some interesting results.