Broadband and tunable terahertz absorption via photogenerated carriers in undoped silicon

Terahertz absorbers based on doped silicon have achieved broadband and high-efficiency absorption due to their high concentration of carriers.However,their tunable performance is obviously insufficient.Here,we propose a new scheme for active terahertz absorption based on undoped silicon with a metamaterial antireflection layer,which realizes both strong absorption and ultrahigh modulation depth.Benefiting from the weak absorption and high transmission of undoped silicon for 1064-nm continuous wave,uniformly distributed carriers across the entire thickness of the absorber are excited,and efficient free carrier absorption of the terahertz wave is obtained.We use only a 500-μm thick absorber and achieve absorption greater than 90%in the range of 0.58 to 1.92 THz,with a peak value of 99%.More important,the absorber can be switched between two working states of nonabsorption and high-efficiency absorption by changing the pump power,which means the modulation depth reaches 100%.This simple and high-performance implementation scheme provides a new idea for the design of terahertz tunable absorbers.