Strong absorption and selective thermal emission from a mid-infrared metamaterial

TL;DR

This paper presents thin-film metamaterials with tunable mid-infrared resonances that exhibit strong absorption and highly selective thermal emission, promising for thermal signature control and sensing applications.

Contribution

It introduces numerically modeled and experimentally validated mid-infrared metamaterials with controllable absorption and polarization-dependent thermal emission.

Findings

Strong mid-infrared absorption resonances achieved

Highly selective thermal emission independent of emission angle

Excellent agreement between experimental results and numerical models

Abstract

We demonstrate thin-film metamaterials with resonances in the mid-infrared wavelength range. Our structures are numerically modeled and experimentally characterized by reflection and angularly-resolved thermal emission spectroscopy. We demonstrate strong and controllable absorption resonances across the mid-infrared wavelength range. In addition, the polarized thermal emission from these samples is shown to be highly selective and largely independent of emission angles from normal to 45 degrees. Experimental results are compared to numerical models with excellent agreement. Such structures hold promise for large-area, low-cost metamaterial coatings for control of gray- or black-body thermal signatures, as well as for possible mid-IR sensing applications.