Plasmonic and Metamaterial Structures as Electromagnetic Absorbers Yanxia Cui 1,2, Yingran He1, Yi Jin1, Fei Ding1, Liu Yang1, Yuqian Ye3, Shoumin Zhong1, Yinyue Lin2, Sailing He1,* 1 State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation, Centre for Optical and Electromagnetic Research, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China 2 Key Lab of Advanced Transducers and Intelligent Control System, Ministry of Education and Shanxi Province, College of Physics and Optoelectronics, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan, 030024, China 3 Department of Physics, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou 310012, China Corresponding author: e-mail
[email protected] 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. 1. Introduction physical phenomena associated with planar or localized SPPs [13,14]. Electromagnetic (EM) wave absorbers are devices in Metamaterials are artificial assemblies of structured which the incident radiation at the operating wavelengths elements of subwavelength size (i.e., much smaller than can be efficiently absorbed, and then transformed into the wavelength of the incident waves) [15]. They are often ohmic heat or other forms of energy.