Scalable‐Manufactured Plasmonic Metamaterial with Omnidirectional Absorption Bandwidth across Visible to Far‐Infrared

Abstract

Broadband, omnidirectional light absorption in the infrared range is critical for emerging aerospace and ground applications, such as machine vision, autonomous vehicle technology, and aerospace telescope. Broadband absorbers (BBAs) need to possess strong absorption through thin structures for high signal-to-noise ratios, as well as manufacturing scalability and service reliability in harsh environment for practical applications. Such requirements rule out many known absorbing materials such as carbon nanotubes that are intrinsically lossy and fragile. Achieving strong lightmatter interaction in the mid-and long-wavelength infrared ranges has been extremely challenging despite long-standing research efforts. Here, an aerospace-grade, ≈2.0 µm-thick hierarchical coral-structured titanium nitride (coral-TiN) plasmonic metamaterial is experimentally realized with over 90% omnidirectional absorption across the visible to the long-wavelength infrared range (0.25-25 µm) using a scalable fabrication method. The broadband optical control of the coral-TiN BBA is achieved by the superposition of the hybridized plasmonic mode in the visible and near-infrared, the cavity mode in the short-wavelength infrared as well as the propagating surface plasmon polariton mode in the mid-and long-wavelength infrared. With conformal alumina coating, the plasmonic absorber demonstrates outstanding reliability in rigorous aerospace-grade tests under harsh mechanical and thermal environmental conditions.

Bionic structures for optimizing the design of stealth materials

“…It is worth noting that some advanced metamaterials have become promising candidate materials for engineering infrared emissivity and thermal radiation, by which means compatible infrared stealth can be achieved. [57][58][59][60] 4 Bionic infrared stealth As mentioned above, current detection methods are so various that the design of RAMs for microwaves fails to meet the requirements of multispectral stealth. The most common multispectral stealth requirement is microwave absorption compatible with infrared stealth.…”

“…It is worth noting that some advanced metamaterials have become promising candidate materials for engineering infrared emissivity and thermal radiation, by which means compatible infrared stealth can be achieved. 57–60…”

Co-Design of Mechanical and Vibration Properties of a Star Polygon-Coupled Honeycomb Metamaterial

“…Welldesigned metamaterials exhibit excellent properties in many fields, such as mechanics [1][2][3][4], acoustics [5][6][7][8][9], optics [10][11][12][13], and electromagnetics [14][15][16]. Due to these special properties, metamaterials have been widely used in transportation [17,18], the automobile industry [19,20], aerospace [21,22], and other fields.…”

Flexible, Ultrathin, and Lithographic‐Free Nanocoral Metamaterial Membrane for Omnidirectional UV–vis–NIR Broadband Absorption

“…For example, nanopatterned anisotropic metamaterials have been demonstrated to show excellent absorption from visible to terahertz. [23][24][25][26] Multilayered 3D metallic nanostructures prepared by femtosecond laser induction, [27] chemical etching, [28,29] and magnetron sputtering [30,31] have also been demonstrated as efficient broadband solar absorbers. Even so, for PMAs on hard substrates, inflexibility strongly restricts their scope of application.…”