Controlling Thermal Emission by Parity-symmetric Fano Resonance of Optical Absorbers in Metasurfaces

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how to control thermal emission in metasurfaces by leveraging parity-symmetric Fano resonance between optical modes, enabling narrow and directional infrared emission.

Contribution

It introduces a novel metasurface design with tunable Fano resonance for controlling thermal emission properties.

Findings

Thermal emission exhibits narrow spectral width.

Emission is highly directional.

Fano resonance enhances emission control.

Abstract

In this study, we designed a metasurface based on Al/SiN/Al nano-sandwich optical absorbers. Parity-symmetric dark magnetic resonance modes, anti-symmetric bright magnetic resonance modes, and surface lattice modes are established simultaneously in such a meta-surface. By changing the structural parameters, the wavelength of the dark mode can be tuned to overlap with the lattice mode. Fano resonance is introduced by coupling between the dark and lattice modes. Angular-resolved thermal emission experiments showed that the thermal emission induced by Fano resonance exhibited a narrow wavelength spectrum and directional radiation angle. Fano-type thermal emitters proposed in this work can possibly be used as coherent infrared light sources in the future.