Plasmonic and metamaterial structures as electromagnetic absorbers

Abstract

Electromagnetic absorbers have drawn increasing attention in many areas. A series of plasmonic and metamaterial structures can work as efficient narrowband absorbers due to the excitation of plasmonic or photonic resonances, providing a great potential for applications in designing selective thermal emitters, biosensing, etc. In other applications such as solar-energy harvesting and photonic detection, the bandwidth of light absorbers is required to be quite broad. Under such a background, a variety of mechanisms of broadband/multiband absorption have been proposed, such as mixing multiple resonances together, exciting phase resonances, slowing down light by anisotropic metamaterials, employing high loss materials and so on.

Enhanced broadband absorption in gold by plasmonic tapered coaxial holes

“…Perfect electromagnetic wave absorbers, which absorb all incident electromagnetic waves without any reflection or transmission, are very important devices or elements for many applications [1,2], e.g. imaging, sensing, emitting, etc.…”

“…Particularly in the stacked multi-layer configuration, a more expanded absorption spectrum can be obtained due to non-resonant slowlight modes induced by multiple resonances [16,17]. In the solar spectral range, resonances in the metamaterial absorbers are always modified by surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) due to the dielectric properties of the compositional metals [2,18]. It is well-known that SPPs have a strong ability to route and manipulate photons in a subwavelength region [2,18], where photons can be strongly absorbed by the compositional metallic and/or lossy dielectric materials [3,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”

“…In the solar spectral range, resonances in the metamaterial absorbers are always modified by surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) due to the dielectric properties of the compositional metals [2,18]. It is well-known that SPPs have a strong ability to route and manipulate photons in a subwavelength region [2,18], where photons can be strongly absorbed by the compositional metallic and/or lossy dielectric materials [3,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. More than one material is contained in all these absorbers, making fabrication more complex [3,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17].…”

Angle-dependent optical perfect absorption and enhanced photoluminescence in excitonic thin films

“…Ultrathin perfect absorbers have been actively studied recently [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Resonant metal nanostructures have been often used together with a back reflection mirror to suppress transmission and induce the destructive interference of reflected light.…”

A high-performance broadband terahertz absorber based on sawtooth-shape doped-silicon

“…The need for high-performance THz absorber is increasing due to both the academic application and military requirement to provide concealment. [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] In the past few years, doped silicon has been introduced to improve the THz absorption efficiency and bandwidth. [22][23][24][25][26][27] As a desirable lossy material at THz frequency, doped silicon can support surface plasmon polaritons and accordingly localized surface plasmon resonances via periodic structures.…”