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Design and Experimental Verification of a Liquid Crystal-Based Terahertz Phase Shifter for Reconfigurable Reflectarrays

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Abstract

A liquid crystal (LC)-based double dipole terahertz phase shifter is proposed. The block model is utilized in simulations to analysis the influence of inhomogeneity of the LC substrate. The sensitive parameters of the double dipole are simulated and analyzed. An array consisting of 30 × 30 patch elements is designed and fabricated. Experimental results exhibit that the phase shift is over 360° in the range of 355.8–358.8 GHz at 1 kHz, at an applied AC bias in the 0–50 V range. The phase change at different frequencies of AC bias voltage is also investigated, and the effect of the frequency of AC bias voltage is expressed by the coefficient of the amplitude of the bias voltage.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.61871171 and 51607050), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant no. JZ2018HGPB0276), and the foundation of Science and Technology on Electronic Information Control Laboratory.

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Correspondence to Guangsheng Deng.

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Yang, J., Gao, S., Wang, P. et al. Design and Experimental Verification of a Liquid Crystal-Based Terahertz Phase Shifter for Reconfigurable Reflectarrays. J Infrared Milli Terahz Waves 41, 665–674 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10762-020-00705-2

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