A nearly omni-directional THz absorber for both transverse electric (TE) and transverse magnetic (TM) polarizations is proposed. Through the excitation of magnetic polariton in a metal-dielectric layer, the incident light is perfectly absorbed in a thin thickness which is about 25 times smaller than the resonance wavelength. By simply stacking several such structural layers with different geometrical dimensions, the bandwidth of this strong absorption can be effectively enhanced due to the hybridization of magnetic polaritons in different layers.
We present the theory, design, and realization of a polarization-insensitive metamaterial absorber for terahertz frequencies. We derive geometrical-independent conditions for effective medium absorbers in general, and for resonant metamaterials specically. Our fabricated design reaches and absorptivity of 78% at 1.145 Thz
Coherent perfect absorption (CPA) refers to interferometrically induced complete absorption of incident light by a partial absorber independently of its intrinsic absorption (which may be vanishingly small) or its thickness. CPA is typically realized in a resonant device, and thus cannot be achieved over a broad continuous spectrum, which thwarts its applicability to photodetectors and solar cells, for example. Here, we demonstrate broadband omni-resonant CPA by placing a thin weak absorber in a planar cavity and pre-conditioning the incident optical field by introducing judicious angular dispersion. We make use of monolayer graphene embedded in silica as the absorber and boost its optical absorption from ~1.6% to ~60% over a bandwidth of ~70 nm in the visible. Crucially, an analytical model demonstrates that placement of the graphene monolayer at a peak in the cavity standing-wave field is not necessary to achieve CPA, contrary to conventional wisdom.
We theoretically and experimentally propose two designs of broadband low-frequency acoustic metasurface absorbers (Sample I/Sample II) for the frequency ranges of 458Hz~968Hz and 231Hz~491Hz (larger than 1 octave), with absorption larger than 0.8, and having the ultra-thin thickness of 5.2cm and 10.4cm respectively ({lambda}/15 for the lowest working frequency and {lambda}/7.5 for the highest frequency). The designed supercell consists of 16 different unit cells corresponding to 16 eigen frequencies for resonant absorptions. The coupling of multiple resonances leads to broadband absorption effect in the full range of the targeted frequency spectrum. In particular, we propose to combine gradient-change channel and coiled structure to achieve simultaneous impedance matching and minimal occupied space, leading to the ultra-thin thickness of the metasurface absorbers. Our conceived ultra-thin low-frequency broadband absorbers may lead to pragmatic implementations and applications in noise control field.
A microwave ultra-broadband polarization-independent metamaterial absorber is demonstrated. It is composed of a periodic array of metal-dielectric multilayered quadrangular frustum pyramids. These pyramids possess resonant absorption modes at multi-frequencies, of which the overlapping leads to the total absorption of the incident wave over an ultra-wide spectral band. The experimental absorption at normal incidence is above 90% in the frequency range of 7.8-14.7GHz, and the absorption is kept large when the incident angle is smaller than 60 degrees. The experimental results agree well with the numerical simulation.
We report on a giant Faraday effect in an electron plasma in n-InSb probed via polarization-resolved terahertz (THz) time-domain spectroscopy. Polarization rotation angles and ellipticities reach as large as {pi}/2 and 1, respectively, over a wide frequency range (0.3-2.5 THz) at magnetic fields of a few Tesla. The experimental results together with theoretical simulations show its promising ability to construct broadband and tunable THz polarization optics, such as a circular polarizer, half-wave plate, and polarization modulators.