Tunable metamaterial dual-band terahertz absorber

• The thermal tunable terahertz absorber has been reported.
• The mechanism of the thermal tunable terahertz absorber has been investigated.
• The electric and magnetic field distributed are all explaining each other.

We report a design of a temperature controlled tunable dual band terahertz absorber. The compact single unit cell consists of two nested closed square ring resonators and a layer metallic separated by a substrate strontium titanate (STO) dielectric layer. It is found that the absorber has two distinctive absorption peaks at frequencies 0.096 THz and 0.137 THz, whose peaks are attained 97% and 75%. Cooling the absorber from 400 K to 250 K causes about 25% and 27% shift compared to the resonance frequency of room temperature, when we cooling the temperature to 150 K, we could attained both the two tunabilities exceeding 53%. The frequency tunability is owing to the variation of the dielectric constant of the low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) substrate. The mechanism of the dual band absorber is attributed to the overlapping of dual resonance frequencies, and could be demonstrated by the distributions of the electric field. The method opens up avenues for designing tunable terahertz devices in detection, imaging, and stealth technology.