Plasmonic and Metamaterial Structures as Electromagnetic Absorbers

TL;DR

This paper reviews plasmonic and metamaterial structures used as electromagnetic absorbers, highlighting their mechanisms for narrowband and broadband absorption and their potential applications in sensing, energy, and photonics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the design principles and mechanisms behind plasmonic and metamaterial electromagnetic absorbers, emphasizing recent advances and applications.

Findings

Efficient narrowband absorbers via plasmonic and photonic resonances.

Various mechanisms for broadband and multiband absorption.

Potential applications in thermal emitters, bio-sensing, and solar energy.

Abstract

Electromagnetic absorbers have drawn increasing attention in many areas. A series of plasmonic and metamaterial structures can work as efficient narrow band absorbers due to the excitation of plasmonic or photonic resonances, providing a great potential for applications in designing selective thermal emitters, bio-sensing, etc. In other applications such as solar energy harvesting and photonic detection, the bandwidth of light absorbers is required to be quite broad. Under such a background, a variety of mechanisms of broadband/multiband absorption have been proposed, such as mixing multiple resonances together, exciting phase resonances, slowing down light by anisotropic metamaterials, employing high loss materials and so on.