Graphene-based tunable polarization sensitive terahertz metamaterial absorber

•At a fixed Fermi level of graphene, the perfect absorption can be achieved at two frequencies under x-polarized wave and one frequency under y-polarized wave.•The absorption peak in two orthogonal directions can be controlled separately by adjusting the Fermi level of graphene.•The absorption frequencies can be tuned by incident wave angles.

A tunable metamaterial absorber composed of a metal ground plane, a SiO2 dielectric spacer, a graphene layer and a metal pattern layer, which is polarization sensitive is numerically proposed at terahertz (THz) frequencies. Our calculated results show that when the Fermi level of graphene is fixed at 0.7 eV, the absorptivities for x-polarized wave are about 0.985 at 6.42 THz, and 0.991 at 8.37 THz, respectively, while the absorptivity for y-polarized wave is about 0.99 at 7.22 THz. Moreover, the calculated electric field and surface current distributions, along with power loss distributions enable us to deeply understand the physical mechanism of resonance absorption. More importantly, absorption spectra at different Fermi levels of graphene and different incident angles are displayed and tuning functions are discussed in detail. This work may provide a further step in the development of potential applications based on metamaterial absorber, such as THz polarization imaging, THz sensing and polarization multiplexing.