Ultra-Narrow Band Mid-Infrared Perfect Absorber Based on Hybrid Dielectric Metasurface

Nanomaterials (Basel). 2019 Sep 20;9(10):1350. doi: 10.3390/nano9101350.

Abstract

Mid-infrared perfect absorbers (PAs) based on metamaterials have many applications in material analysis and spectral detection thanks to the associated strong light-matter interaction. Most of the PAs are built as 'metal nanostructure'-insulator-metals (MIM). In this paper, we propose an ultra-narrow band absorber based on dielectric metasurface with a metal film substrate. The absorptance comes from the plasmonic absorption in the metal film, where the absorption is enhanced (while the band of that is compressed) by the super cavity effect of the dielectric metasurface. Based on our numerical calculation, the full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) can reach 67 nm at 8 μm (8‱), which is more than two orders of magnitude smaller than the resonance wavelength and much narrower than the theoretical FWHMs of MIM absorbers. Moreover, we studied their application in infrared thermal imaging, which also has more benefits than MIM absorbers. This kind of hybrid dielectric metasurface provides a new route to achieve ultra-narrow band perfect absorbers in the mid-infrared regime and can be broadly applied in detectors, thermal emitters and bio-spectroscopy.

Keywords: dielectric metasurface; mid-infrared; perfect absorber; plasmonics; sensing.