Resonant absorbers based on nanostructured materials are promising for variety of applications including optical filters, thermophotovoltaics, thermal emitters, and hot-electron collection. One of the significant challenges for such micro/nanoscale featured medium or surface, however, is costly lithographic processes for structural patterning which restricted from industrial production of complex designs. Here, we demonstrate lithography-free, broadband, polarization-independent optical absorbers based on a three-layer ultrathin film composed of subwavelength chromium (Cr) and oxide film coatings. We have measured almost perfect absorption as high as 99.5% across the entire visible regime and beyond (400–800 nm). In addition to near-ideal absorption, our absorbers exhibit omnidirectional independence for incidence angle over ±60 degrees. Broadband absorbers introduced in this study perform better than nanostructured plasmonic absorber counterparts in terms of bandwidth, polarization and angle independence. Improvements of such “blackbody” samples based on uniform thin-film coatings is attributed to extremely low quality factor of asymmetric highly-lossy Fabry-Perot cavities. Such broadband absorber designs are ultrathin compared to carbon nanotube based black materials, and does not require lithographic processes. This demonstration redirects the broadband super absorber design to extreme simplicity, higher performance and cost effective manufacturing convenience for practical industrial production.

Resonant absorbers based on plasmonic materials, metamaterials, and thin films enable spectrally selective absorption filters, where absorption is maximized at the resonance wavelength. By controlling the geometrical parameters of nano/microstructures and materials' refractive indices, resonant absorbers are designed to operate at wide range of wavelengths for applications including absorption filters, thermal emitters, thermophotovoltaic devices, and sensors. However, once resonant absorbers are fabricated, it is rather challenging to control and tune the spectral absorption response. Here, we propose and demonstrate thermally tunable infrared resonant absorbers using hybrid gold-vanadium dioxide (VO2) nanostructure arrays. Absorption intensity is tuned from 90% to 20% and 96% to 32% using hybrid gold-VO2 nanowire and nanodisc arrays, respectively, by heating up the absorbers above the phase transition temperature of VO2 (68 °C). Phase change materials such as VO2 deliver useful means of altering optical properties as a function of temperature. Absorbers with tunable spectral response can find applications in sensor and detector applications, in which external stimulus such as heat, electrical signal, or light results in a change in the absorption spectrum and intensity.

We show that a triple-layer metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structure has spectrally selective IR absorption, while an ultra-thin metal film has non-selective absorption in the near infrared wavelengths. Both sub-wavelength scale structures were implemented with an ultra-thin 6 nm Cr top layer. MIM structure was demonstrated to have near perfect absorption at λ = 1.2 μm and suppressed absorption at λ = 1.8 μm in which experimental and simulated absorptions of the thin Cr film are even higher than the MIM. Occurrence of absorption peaks and dips in the MIM were explained with the electric field intensity localization as functions of both the wavelength and the position. It has been shown that the power absorption in the lossy material is a strong function of the electric field intensity i.e. the more the electric field intensity, the more the absorption and vice versa. Therefore, it is possible to engineer IR emissive properties of these ultra-thin nanocavities by controlling the electric field localization with proper designs.

Plasmonic and metamaterial based nano/micro-structured materials enable spectrally selective resonant absorption, where the resonant bandwidth and absorption intensity can be engineered by controlling the size and geometry of nanostructures. Here, we demonstrate a simple, lithography-free approach for obtaining a resonant and dynamically tunable broadband absorber based on vanadium dioxide (VO2) phase transition. Using planar layered thin film structures, where top layer is chosen to be an ultrathin (20 nm) VO2 film, we demonstrate broadband IR light absorption tuning (from ~90% to ~30% in measured absorption) over the entire mid-wavelength infrared spectrum. Our numerical and experimental results indicate that the bandwidth of the absorption bands can be controlled by changing the dielectric spacer layer thickness. Broadband tunable absorbers can find applications in absorption filters, thermal emitters, thermophotovoltaics and sensing.