Ultrafast terahertz transmission/group delay switching in photoactive WSe2-functionalized metaphotonic devices

Abstract The emergence of larger-scaled two-dimensional (2D) layered materials has attracted intense research efforts and significant progress in the area of photonics and optoelectronics recently. As a remarkable representative of 2D materials, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have demonstrated an astonishing photoconductivity and the ultrafast charge carrier dynamics, which provides excellent potentials for ultrafast optical modulators. Herein, by simply transferring a high-quality CVD-grown WSe2 multilayer on plasmon-induced transparency (PIT) metasurfaces, we demonstrate that the transmission amplitude modulation is as high as 43% and the slow light switching is up to 6 ps in the THz regime. Under photoexcitation, both functionalities are dynamically controlled within ~8 ps owing to a merit of ultrafast free carriers’ relaxation in the WSe2 multilayer. Moreover, a theoretical model consisting of two coupled harmonic oscillators and the near-field distributions are simultaneously employed to verify the strong dependence of the active PIT switching behavior on the suppression of the bright mode of split ring resonators. Our proposed versatile active WSe2-functionalized metasurface with a low cost and simple manufacturing will give researchers new insights into the ultrafast switchable metaphotonic devices.