A Metamaterial Emitter for Highly Efficient Radiative Cooling

We demonstrate, for the first time, a spatially dependent metamaterial perfect absorber operating in the infrared regime. We achieve an experimental absorption of 97% at a wavelength of 6.0 microns, and our results agree well with numerical full-wave simulations. By using two different metamaterial sublattices we experimentally demonstrate a spatial and frequency varying absorption which may have many relevant applications including hyperspectral sub-sampling imaging

We demonstrate that 100% light absorption can take place in a single patterned sheet of doped graphene. General analysis shows that a planar array of small lossy particles exhibits full absorption under critical-coupling conditions provided the cross section of each individual particle is comparable to the area of the lattice unit-cell. Specifically, arrays of doped graphene nanodisks display full absorption when supported on a substrate under total internal reflection, and also when lying on a dielectric layer coating a metal. Our results are relevant for infrared light detectors and sources, which can be made tunable via electrostatic doping of graphene.

Metamaterial-based perfect absorbers utilize intrinsic loss, with the aid of appropriate structural design, to achieve near unity absorption at a certain wavelength. For most of the reported absorbers, the absorption occurs only at a single wavelength where plasmon resonances are excited in the nanostructures. Here we introduce a dual-band perfect absorber based on a gold nanocross structure. Two bands of maximum absorption of 94% are experimentally accomplished by breaking the symmetry of the cross structure. Furthermore, we demonstrate the two bands can be readily tuned throughout the mid-infrared with their associated resonances giving rise to large near-field enhancements. These features are ideal for multiband surface-enhanced infrared spectroscopy applications. We experimentally demonstrate this application by simultaneously detecting two molecular vibrational modes of a 4 nm thick polymer film utilizing our proposed absorber. Furthermore, in response to variations in the interaction strength between the plasmonic and molecular dipoles, we observe an anticrossing behavior and modification in the spectral line shape of the molecular absorption peak, which are characteristic of the coupling between the two modes.