Babinet complementary patterns of a spectrally tunable metamaterial incorporating a nematic liquid crystal is normally assumed to exhibit the same tuning range. Here we show that for a hybrid, liquid crystal-loaded metamaterial, the sensitivity of its terahertz resonances to the variations of the refractive index differs substantially for the two complementary patterns. This is due to a mismatch between the alignment of the liquid crystal and the direction of the local electric field induced in the metamaterial patterns. Furthermore, and more intriguingly, our experimental data indicate that it is possible to shift the resonance of the positive metamaterial pattern beyond the limit imposed by the alignment mismatch. Our analysis suggests that the observed anomalous frequency shift results from the orientational optical nonlinearity of a nematic liquid crystal.

中文翻译：

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液晶负载太赫兹超材料中的异常共振频移

通常假设包含向列液晶的光谱可调超材料的巴比奈互补图案表现出相同的调谐范围。在这里，我们表明，对于混合的、装载液晶的超材料，其太赫兹共振对折射率变化的敏感性对于两个互补图案有很大不同。这是由于液晶的排列与在超材料图案中感应的局部电场的方向之间的不匹配。此外，更有趣的是，我们的实验数据表明，可以将正超材料图案的共振移动到超出对准失配所施加的限制。