A Numerical Investigation of Metamaterial Antireflection Coatings

Electromagnetic metamaterials have emerged as a new class of effective media where exotic properties are determined from structural geometry and dimensions of the basic building blocks, or meta-atoms. Through such a bottom-up approach, metamaterials have found applications in the construction of terahertz functional devices and components with unprecedented performance. In this paper, we numerically investigate planar metamaterials that function as antireflection coatings for dielectric surfaces, suppressing the reflection and enhancing the transmission. We show in detail how the metamaterial structures and losses affect the antireflection performance. We also show the angular dependence of metamaterial antireflection for both transverse electric and transverse magnetic polarizations, which reveals a tunable Brewster’s angle behavior.