Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S. in Engineering Science

Department

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor

Alexander B. Yakovlev

Second Advisor

Elliott Hutchcraft

Third Advisor

Paul M. Goggans

Relational Format

dissertation/thesis

Abstract

Graphene is a two-dimensional carbon crystal that became one of the most controversial topics of research in the last few years. The intense interest in graphene stems from recent demonstrations of their potentially revolutionary electromagnetic applications – including negative refraction, subdiffraction imaging, and even invisibility – which have suggested a wide range of new devices for communications, sensing, and biomedicine. In addition, it has been shown that graphene is amenable to unique patterning schemes such as cutting, bending, folding, and fusion that are predicted to lead to interesting properties. A recent proposed application of graphene is in engineering the scattering properties of objects, which may be leveraged in applications such as radar-cross-section management and stealth, where it may be required to make one object look like another object or render an object completely invisible. We present the analytical formulation for the analysis of electromagnetic interaction with a finite conducting wedge covered with a cylindrically shaped nanostructured graphene metasurface, resulting in the scattering cancellation of the dominant scattering mode for all the incident and all the observation angles. Following this idea, the cylindrical graphene metasurface is utilized for cloaking of several concentric finite conducting wedges. In addition, a wedge shaped metasurface is proposed as an alternative approach for cloaking of finite wedges. The resolution of the conventional imaging lenses is restricted by the natural diffraction limit. Artificially engineered metamaterials now offer the possibility of creating a superlens that overcomes this restriction. We demonstrate that a wire medium (WM) slab loaded with graphene sheets enables the enhancement of the near field for subwavelength imaging at terahertz (THz) frequencies. The analysis is based on the nonlocal homogenization model for WM with the additional boundary condition in the connection of wires to graphene. The principle of the operation of the proposed lens depends on the enhancement of evanescent waves, wherein the excited surface plasmons at the lower and upper graphene interfaces are coupled by an array of metallic wires. The resolution and the operating frequency of the subwavelength imaging device are mainly determined by the tunability of graphene and the structural parameters of the WM slab. The proposed structure has a resolution better than λ/10 with the advantages of broad bandwidth, low sensitivity to losses, and tunability with respect to the chemical potential even if the distance between two graphene sheets is a significant fraction of wavelength. As a supplementary study, the performance of WM slab loaded with nanostructured graphene metasurfaces as a novel sub-diffraction imaging lens is studied. It is observed that the dual nature (capacitive/inductive) of the nanostructured graphene metasurface can be utilized to design a dual-band lens in which the subwavelength imaging simultaneously at two tunable distinct frequencies is possible. The analytical results which are presented throughout this thesis, are validated with the full-wave electromagnetic simulator, CST Microwave Studio.

Concentration/Emphasis

Emphasis: Electromagnetics

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