Perfect sound absorbers with a deep-subwavelength thickness are important to applications such as noise reduction and sound detection. But their absorption bandwidths are usually narrow and difficult to adjust. A recent solution for this problem relies on multiple-resonator metasurfaces, which are hard to fabricate. Here, we report on the design, fabrication, and characterization of a single-channel labyrinthine metasurface, which allows total sound absorption at resonant frequency when appropriate amounts of porous media (or critical sound losses) are introduced in the channels. The absorption bandwidth can be tuned by changing the cross-sectional areas of channels. A tradeoff is found between the absorption bandwidth and the metasurface thickness. However, large tunability in the relative absorption bandwidth (from 17% to 121%) is still attainable by such metasurfaces with a deep-subwavelength thickness (0.03–0.13λ).
Based on analytic formulas and numerical simulations, we investigate the enhancement effect of Au gratings with spoof plasmon resonances on quantum-well infrared photodetectors (QWIPs) operating between 2 and 30 μm. It is found that a simple analytic formula can well estimate the resonant wavelengths of Au gratings. Using optimal grating parameters, the absorption in the QW active region can be enhanced by 4-5 times compared with that in the reference structure (without gratings and with an isotropic active region). For s-polarized light, a high enhancement (>1.4) can occur in a broad range of incident angle (|θ|<40°).
Metamaterials are artificial structures which exhibit fascinating properties unreachable by traditional materials. Here, we report on the design, fabrication, and characterization of acoustic metasurfaces consisting of dead-end channels coiled in a 2D plane. It is found that when the area of the channel’s cross section is about 1/10 of the area (4.3 cm × 4.3 cm) of the upper surface of the building block, the sound loss in channels approaches to a critical value, resulting in near-perfect absorption (A > 99%) at resonant frequency. When the building block contains ten channels with specially designed lengths, sound waves can be highly absorbed above a cutoff frequency fc (A > 90% for fc < f < 3fc). The wavelength at the cutoff frequency can be 7.1 times of the thickness of the metasurface. Our results could find applications in noise reduction and sound detection.
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