11/29/2021
By Zachary Kurland

The Kennedy College of Science, Department of Physics & Applied Physics, invites you to attend a Master's thesis defense by Zachary Kurland on "A Novel Metasurface Design for the Purpose of Thin Dielectric Material Sensing."

The defense will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 7 at 1 p.m. via Zoom. Please contact Zachary Kurland for meeting information if you are interested in attending.

Committee:

  • Andrew Gatesman, Physics Department
  • Tim Cook, Physics Department
  • Viktor Podolskiy, Physics Department

Brief Abstract:
Metasurface research is a multidisciplinary field that has dawned a new era of optical, material, and photonics science. With meticulous engineering of two-dimensional, periodically arranged, individual subwavelength structures, optical behavior unseen in nature has been realized. Metasurfaces have advanced fields from radar cloaking to virus detection and proved rich in potential for fundamental scientific exploration. In this master’s thesis, a design for a periodically arranged W-band metasurface for the purpose of transmissive fine powder spectroscopy is simulated with the commercially available electromagnetic simulation software (HFSS) and experimentally tested. In order to characterize the complex dielectric properties of the thin dielectric powders presented in this thesis and extract their effective thicknesses, an equivalent circuit method is presented.

The proposed metasurface device may allow for the identification and characterization of fine powders present on its surface. Such a device may be useful during a personnel screening process (i.e. at an airport) and in industrial manufacturing environments where early detection of harmful airborne particulates can be a matter of security or safety. To our knowledge, the requisite science to design a W-band metasurface device capable of such powder detection has not been fully explored. This master’s thesis proposes a novel W-band metasurface device design which could reliably detect, identify, and characterize particulate layers effectively hundreds of times thinner than the metasurface's resonant wavelength.