Digital Aerosol Jet Printing for the Fabrication of Terahertz Metamaterials

In this paper the use of aerosol jet printing as a fabrication and rapid prototyping method for terahertz metamaterials is presented. Since this technique combines the very precise deposition of metallic inks with line widths down to 10 mu m and the use of digitally generated tool paths, it is highly suitable for fabricating arbitrary 2D microstructures for terahertz applications. The fabrication of a metamolecule composed of four closed ring resonators with two different radii on conventional polyester foil is shown. Furthermore, the metamaterials are characterized thoroughly using microscopic images, confocal microscopy, and terahertz time-domain spectroscopy, which demonstrate impressively the suitability of this fabrication technology for terahertz applications. For an additional validation the experimentally gathered data with numerical simulations are compared.