Design and fabrication guide for a new metamaterial as an absorber of visible light with exceptionally high absorption efficiency

TL;DR

This paper introduces a CMOS-compatible metamaterial microstructure designed to achieve exceptionally high visible light absorption (~98%) with optimized structural parameters validated through simulations and experiments.

Contribution

It provides a novel design and fabrication guide for a high-efficiency visible light absorber using a specific TiN-based microstructure.

Findings

Achieves ~98% absorption efficiency in the visible spectrum

Demonstrates nearly 96% absorption over 400-1200 nm spectrum

Shows good agreement between simulation and experimental results

Abstract

We present a guide for the design and fabrication of a CMOS-compatible metamaterial microstructure as an absorber of visible light with exceptionally high absorption efficiency (~ 98%), for wavelengths 400nm-700nm. The structural parameters of the microstructure have been optimized by using Finite Element method (FEM) based COMSOL multyphysics software simulations. An optimized 2D unit cell of the structure consists of 4um by 160 nm TiN base on glass substrate covered with 70 nm thick silicon dioxide (SiO2). A periodic structure of titanium nitride (TiN) straps (each of 90 nm thick and 2-micron wide) is deposited over SiO2. The straps are capped with 40 nm thick layer of high-temperature dielectric hafnium dioxide (HfO2) with periodicity of 4-micron. This unit is symmetric along the other dimension and repeated periodically along the horizontal direction. Additionally, though this microstructure was optimized for visible light spectrum, it also shows almost similar absorption of ~96% intigrated over wavelenght spectrum from 400 nm to 1200 nm. This investigation shows good agreement between simulation and experimental results.