Organic Electronic Materials in Microwave Metadevices: Challenges and Opportunities

Metamaterials are a new class of functional materials with unique optical properties, not achievable with natural compounds, which can be used to engineer unconventional photonic systems and devices. Reconfigurable microwave metamaterials - i.e. metadevices - are generally fabricated on rigid substrates, and their properties are electrically tuned by lumped electronic components, such as varactor or pin diodes, and rf transistors. Other state-of-the-art tuning technologies rely on electroactive inorganic or 2D materials, which however require sophisticated and expensive fabrication processes, and are poorly compatible with large-area and high-throughput deposition techniques on flexible platforms. For this reason, a tuning strategy based on organic electronic materials holds a considerable potential for enhancing the pervasiveness of metadevice technologies, thanks to their electrochemical tunability, charge-modulation range, and processability.