Sub-terahertz metamaterial stickers for non-invasive fruit ripeness sensing.

ABSTRACT: Fruits and vegetables account for around a third of all food loss and waste. Post-harvest, retail and consumer losses and waste could be reduced with better ripeness assessment methods. Here we develop a sub-terahertz metamaterial sticker (called Meta-Sticker) that can be attached to a fruit to provide insights into the edible mesocarp's ripeness without cutting into the produce. The fruit acts as a complex multilayer substrate to Meta-Sticker and, when excited by sub-terahertz signals, generates two distinct resonances: localized dipole resonance that correlates with the exocarp's refractive index; and propagating plasmon resonance that penetrates into the mesocarp and resembles the rare phenomenon of 'extraordinary transmission'. The Meta-Sticker accurately predicted the ripeness of diff

SUBMITTER: Karmakar S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11772249 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature