Ultra-thin perfect absorber employing a tunable phase change material

By Mikhail A. Kats, D. Sharma, Jiao Lin, Patrice Genevet, R. Blanchard, Zheng Yang, M. M. Qazilbash, D. Basov, Shriram Ramanathan, F. Capasso. 2012

599 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that perfect absorption can be achieved in a system comprising a single lossy dielectric layer of thickness much smaller than the incident wavelength on an opaque substrate by utilizing the nontrivial phase shifts at interfaces between lossy media. This design is implemented with an ultra-thin (∼λ/65) vanadium dioxide (VO2) layer on sapphire, temperature tuned in the vicinity of the VO2 insulator-to-metal phase transition, leading to 99.75% absorption at λ = 11.6 μm. The structural simplicity and large tuning range (from ∼80% to 0.25% in reflectivity) are promising for thermal emitters, modulators, and bolometers.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2366b4401ba5046f1f0577205eb0b386e3812a17

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In Civil and Structural Engineering

Vladimir M. Shalaev

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

In Polymers and Plastics

F. Capasso

Citations in the corpus

Dynamic control of electromagnetic wave propagation with the equivalent principle inspired tunable metasurface (2014, background): “To satisfy this requirement, it can be shown that jR 6 Tj 5 1 from equations (5) and (6), which leads to”
Vanadium Dioxide as a Natural Disordered Metamaterial: Perfect Thermal Emission and Large Broadband Negative Differential Thermal Emittance (2013, unknown): “The spectral position of this emissivity peak can be tuned from approximately 950 to 770 cm 1 by varying the VO2 film thickness from approximately 20 to 400 nm [26].”
Spatiotemporal light control with active metasurfaces (2019, methodology): “This material has been used to build thermally controlled ultrathin perfect absorbers (52) and to implement a thermally tunable terahertz lens (20).”
A Metasurfaces Review: Definitions and Applications (2019, background): “An entirely different paradigm to structure metasurfaces is presented in [36,37].”
Optical absorbers based on strong interference in ultra‐thin films (2016, background): “the perfect absorption condition of Eqns. (8-10). At this point, approximately 90% of the incident light is absorbed into the VO 2 , while the remaining 10% absorbed in the top 1-2 �m of the sapphire [39]. Just as with the ultra-thin absorbers in the visible in Sections VI and VII, this reflectivity”