Polarization-controlled dual-band broadband infrared absorber

As an important branch of metamaterial-based devices, metamaterial absorber (MA) has aroused great interest and made great progress in the past several years. By manipulating the magnetic resonance and the electric resonance simultaneously, the effective impedance of MA will match the free space impedance, thus resulting in a perfect absorption of incident waves. Due to the advantages of thin thickness, flexible design and tunable property, MA has been extensively studied at various frequencies, e.g. microwave frequency, THz, infrared frequency, and optical frequency. Infrared MA, having important applications in infrared stealth, infrared detection, radiative cooling, and sensors, receives more and more attention, especially for those absorbers based on easy-fabricated one-dimensional grating structure. However, such a grating-based absorber is usually workable in narrow band and effective only for transverse magnetic (TM) wave. In this paper, a dual-band broadband absorber is proposed based on the easy-fabricated grating structure. The basic unit of the proposed absorber consists of eight gradient subunits, each of which is composed of vertically cascaded two pairs of metal-dielectric bilayers. The as-designed absorber has perfect absorption for both TM and transverse electric (TE) waves. More importantly, the absorption band is different for different polarized wave, which provides more choices and greater flexibility for application. Full-wave simulation shows that the absorption of TM wave is above 90% from 1.68 mu m to 2 mu m, while the absorption of TE wave is very small (no more than 6%). The absorption of TE wave is above 90% from 3.8 to 3.9 mu m, while the absorption of TM wave is very small (no more than 5%). In order to reveal the working principle of the proposed absorber, the electric-field distributions of the whole structure are calculated at different frequency, which demonstrates that the broadband absorption is achieved by exciting multiple resonant coupling. Furthermore, we investigate the performance of the proposed absorber in oblique incidence, and find that the designed absorber can exhibit a good absorption within a broad incident angle ranging from 0 to 60 degrees. It is worth noting that there is an absorption fracture band in the absorption spectrum of TM waves, which is because no resonance occurs in all subunits, resulting in almost no absorption. In conclusion, we have proposed a dual-band broadband absorber that demonstrates independent absorption of the TM waves and the waves in different bands, which has potential applications in thermal detectors and thermal emitters. The proposed scheme can be extended to microwave, THz, and even visible light band.