Wide Angle of Incidence-Insensitive Polarization-Independent THz Metamaterial Absorber for Both TE and TM Mode Based on Plasmon Hybridizations

Materials (Basel). 2018 Apr 25;11(5):671. doi: 10.3390/ma11050671.

Abstract

An ultra-wide-angle THz metamaterial absorber (MA) utilizing sixteen-circular-sector (SCR) resonator for both transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) mode is designed and investigated numerically. At normal incidence, the absorptivity of the proposed MA is higher than 93.7% at 9.05 THz for different polarization angles, due to the rotational symmetry structure of the unit cell. Under oblique incidence, the absorptivity can still exceed 90%, even when the incident angle is up to 70° for both TE and TM mode. Especially, the frequency variation in TE mode is less than 0.25% for different incident angles from 0° to 70°. The electric field (Ez) distributions are used to explain the absorption mechanism. Numerical simulation results show that the high absorption with wide-angle independence stems from fundamental dipole resonance and gap surface plasmons. The broadband deep-infrared MA is also obtained by stacking three metal-dielectric layers. The designed MA has great potential in bolometric pixel elements, biomedical sensors, THz imaging, and solar cells.

Keywords: broadband; metamaterial absorber; plasmonics; single band; sixteen-circular-sector (SCR) resonator; wide angles of incidence.