Open Access

Numerical Study of a Wide-Angle and

Polarization-Insensitive Ultrabroadband
Metamaterial Absorber in Visible and
Near-Infrared Region
Volume 11, Number 1, February 2019

Nguyen Thi Quynh Hoa

Phan Huu Lam
Phan Duy Tung
Tran Sy Tuan
Hugo Nguyen

DOI: 10.1109/JPHOT.2018.2888971
1943-0655 © 2018 IEEE
IEEE Photonics Journal Wide-Angle and Polarization-Insensitive Ultrabroadband MA

Numerical Study of a Wide-Angle and

Polarization-Insensitive Ultrabroadband
Metamaterial Absorber in Visible and
Near-Infrared Region
Nguyen Thi Quynh Hoa ,1 Phan Huu Lam,1 Phan Duy Tung,1
Tran Sy Tuan,1,2 and Hugo Nguyen3

1 Schoolof Engineering and Technology, Vinh University, Vinh City, Vietnam

2 Nguyen Tat Thanh University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
3 Department of Engineering Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

DOI:10.1109/JPHOT.2018.2888971
1943-0655  C 2018 IEEE. Translations and content mining are permitted for academic research only.

Personal use is also permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.

See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.

Manuscript received October 16, 2018; revised December 16, 2018; accepted December 17, 2018. Date
of publication January 1, 2019; date of current version January 15, 2019. This research is funded by
Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) under grant num-
ber 103.02-2017.367. Corresponding author: Nguyen Thi Quynh Hoa (e-mail: ntqhoa@vinhuni.edu.vn).

Abstract: An ultrabroadband metamaterial absorber structure based on a periodic array of

metallic-dielectric multilayered conical frustums is numerically investigated and proposed.
The metamaterial absorber indicated an absorptivity of higher than 90%, which covered the
visible and near-infrared region at 480–1480 nm, and a relative absorption bandwidth of
102%. The high absorptivity can be maintained with large incident angles up to 60° under
both transverse electric and transverse magnetic polarizations. Furthermore, the proposed
absorber exhibits polarization insensitivity owing to its rotational symmetry structure. Com-
pared with the previously reported ultrabroadband metamaterial absorbers, the design in
this work indicates high practical feasibility in terms of a compact structure for a large band-
width, a wide incident angle, and polarization insensitivity, thereby suggesting its promising
application, for example, in solar cells and thermal emitters.

Index Terms: Absorber, metamaterial, near-infrared, ultrabroadband, visible.

1. Introduction
Electromagnetic metamaterials that do not exist in nature have recently attracted significant attention
in both theoretical research and practical applications because of their exotic properties, such as
negative refractive index. Perfect absorbers based on metamaterial have been studied extensively
for various applications, such as imaging, sensing, super lensing and energy harvesting of solar cells
[1]–[12]. Since a thin perfect microwave metamaterial absorber (MA) was first demonstrated in 2008
by Landy et al. [13], the design of MA was investigated for a wideband from microwave frequencies
to optical frequencies [13]–[28]. The absorption mechanism is generally based on magnetic and/or
electrical resonance [13], [24]–[26]. However, the MA bandwidth is normally narrow because of their
resonance features, thereby limiting the practical applications that require broadband absorption
such as solar energy harvesting. Tuning of impedance for matching free space to eliminate the
reflection is a means of creating a perfect MA [20], [24], [27]. Recently, ideas for broadening the
MA bandwidth based on the combination of various continuous absorption peaks are suggested

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IEEE Photonics Journal Wide-Angle and Polarization-Insensitive Ultrabroadband MA

such as combining various unit cells of perfect absorption peaks [22], [23] and stacking metallic
and dielectric material layers [14]–[21]. Compared with the stacking method, the combining design
indicates disadvantages for extending the absorption band because the number of resonance
combinations is limited. Therefore, most of these studies have focused on stacking design to realize
the broadband absorption using different structures such as sawtooth [15], taper [16], [17], conical
frustum [6] and frustum pyramid [7], [18], [19]. Besides, by tunable metal/dielectric multilayered
structures, these designed MA can be realized to operate in a particular absorption band. For
example, Ding et al. proposed the truncated pyramid absorber composed of 20 copper/FR4 pairs
which can realize an absorptivity higher than 90% in the microwave range of 7.8 to 14.7 GHz
[29]. The similar stacking design using other dielectric element was demonstrated to develop the
broadband absorber operated in the mid-infrared range [30]. Cui et al. numerically presented a
broadband saw-toothed infrared absorber made of 20 layers of gold and germanium thin films, which
achieve an absorption over 95% in the wavelength ranging from 3 to 5.5 μm [15]. Furthermore, Liang
et al. proposed a metamaterial-based nanopyramid array formed by 17 pairs of alternating gold and
germanium thin films which shows near 100% absorbing property in the entire solar spectrum from
0.2 to 2.5 μm [31]. However, one drawback of most of these structures is that they only efficiently
absorb the electromagnetic wave with narrow angle tolerance and polarization sensitivity because
of its less symmetrical structure. Another drawback is that the designs are not easily applicable
to manufacturing with the conventional microelectronic mechanical systems (MEMS) technology.
Our recent study shows that the absorber based on a symmetrical metallic-dielectric multilayered
conical frustum structure with their diameter tapered linearly from the bottom to the top exhibited
a wide-angle and polarization insensitivity and absorptivity above 90% in microwave region [32].
However, the multilayered structures with their size tapered linearly from the bottom to the top
present a poor selectivity of absorption spectra [33], therefore they requires a large number of
metal-dielectric layers to obtain a broadband absorption. The tapered frustum pyramid in [7] needs
20 layers of metal-dielectric-metal for the absorption frequencies ranged from 7 to 18 GHz. The
conical frustum structure in [6], also with tapered shape, uses 22 to 26 pairs of metal-dielectric
layers for its ultrabroadband absorption. Furthermore, the tapered sawtooth design in [15] consists
of 20 alternating layers of metal-dielectric pairs to obtain a wide range of frequencies. Notably, the
large number of metal-dielectric layers of tapered structure can cause complexity in large-scale
fabrication since the conventional deposition of all layers cannot be performed in one step and
it is difficult to obtain the exactly smooth surface from bottom to top by lithography process. To
relieve these problems, another approach can be using non-tapered structure where the size of
each metal-dielectric layer is step changed from bottom to top [18], [19]. The distinct resonance
frequencies created by different sized layers are combined and produced the overall broadband
absorption response. The distinct resonance frequencies can be controlled by changing the layer
sizes, therefore the non-tapered structures can be tailored to improve the selectivity of absorption
spectra and to reduce the number of metal-dielectric layers, and thus to ease the large-scale
fabrication.
In this letter, we propose a design of a wide-angle, polarization insensitive ultrabroadband MA
for the visible and near infrared region based on a non-tapered symmetrical metallic-dielectric
multilayered conical frustum structure. The conical frustum structure is made of cylindrical disks
stacked over each other preferably by lithography steps. The broadband absorption mechanism and
absorption performance of the designed MA are thoroughly investigated by numerical modeling.

2. Structure Design and Method

The MA is designed with respect to the feasibility of manufacturing with the existing techniques
of micro- and nanotechnology, such as high-resolution lithography, thin-film deposition and the
conventional materials that can be used for manufacturing. As regards performance, the design in
this work is aimed for the MA to absorb the energy from visible and near-infrared light as much
as possible at a reasonable low manufacturing cost. Thus, the proposed MA suitably includes a
periodic array of conical frustums of layered metallic-dielectric thin films (see Fig. 1). A unit cell of the

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Fig. 1. Schematic of proposed terahertz ultrabroadband MA: (a) tilted top view, (b) cross-section view
of a unit cell. Note: D is the lattice constant.

Fig. 2. Dependencies of relative absorbance bandwidth on unit cell parameters: (a) lattice constant for
t = 15 nm, h = 30 nm; (b) metallic thickness for D = 230 nm, h = 30 nm; (c) dielectric thickness for D
= 230 nm, t = 10 nm.

MA is composed of a metallic ground layer on which dielectric and metallic disk pairs are stacked
on top of each other, thereby forming a frustum. All metallic and dielectric layers are in form of
cylindrical disks. Metallic layers are made of gold with an electric conductivity of 4.561 × 107 Sm−1 ,
whereas the dielectric layers are made of silicon with a relative dielectric constant of 11.9 [28], [30].
Silicon is chosen because it exhibits good mechanical and thermal stability, and gold is selected
because it can withstand excessive heat in the targeted applications and indicates high reflectance
in the presence of high-frequency radiations. In the modeling, the permittivity of gold is provided by
the Drude model εp = 1.367 × 1016 Hz with the plasma frequency εp = 1.367 × 1016 Hz and the
collision frequency γ = 1.256 × 1014 Hz [8], [30]. The total number of metallic/dielectric layers (N)
is 10 depending on the desired relative absorption bandwidth (BW), as discussed further in the
results and discussion part. Notably, a high number N corresponds directly to a high manufacturing
cost and also leads to pointed tops of the structure that are difficult to realize. The thickness of the
ground layer (tg) is 50 nm because it is not necessarily thicker based on the numerical modeling.
The unit cell parameters are optimized to obtain higher absorption performance. Starting from a
suitable base diameter (b) of 110 nm, the top diameter (a) of the frustum is 42.5 nm based on the
modeling.
The absorption performance of an MA can be evaluated from the relative absorption bandwidth
(BW) defined as B W = 2(λU − λL )/(λU + λL ), where and are the upper and lower limits of a wave-
length range with the absorptivity above 90%. Fig. 2 shows the progress steps of the optimization
of unit cell parameters. The BW is first calculated for different lateral lattice constants (D) with a
fixed metallic and dielectric layer thickness t = 15 nm and h = 30 nm, respectively, as shown in
Fig. 2(a). These t and h values are iteratively modeled and selected as the feasible thicknesses for
manufacturing and possibly close values to the optimal ones. The lattice constant D = 230 nm is

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Fig. 3. Absorption, reflection and transmission spectra of proposed terahertz ultrabroadband MA.

selected for the maximum BW. Once the lattice constant is determined, the absorption for different
metallic and dielectric layer thicknesses can be recalculated and the optimized values are 10 nm
and 35 nm, respectively, as shown in Fig. 2(b) and (c). As a result, the total thickness of this device,
calculated as 10 × t + 10 × h + tg, is only 500 nm.
We use software Computer Simulation Technology (CST) Microwave Studio with frequency do-
main solver to investigate the absorption performance of the MA. In the boundary condition set
up, X-, Y- and Z-axes are for E-, H-field and the direction of wave propagation, respectively. The
X- and Y-axes are fixed to the unit cell, whereas the Z-axis is open, as shown in Fig. 1(a). The
frequency-dependent absorption of an MA can be calculated as A(ω) = 1 − R(ω) − T(ω), where R(ω)
= |S11 |2 and T(ω) = |S21 |2 are the frequency-dependent reflection and transmission, respectively.
In absorber design, the transmission can be eliminated (T(ω) = 0) owing to the electromagnetic
shielding when a metallic layer is used. Then, the absorption can be simply calculated as A(ω) = 1
− R(ω). Therefore, the perfect absorptivity can be achieved by constraining the reflection to zero.

3. Results and Discussion

Fig. 3 shows the absorption, reflection and transmission spectra of the proposed MA. The absorption
spectrum at normal incidence indicates that the proposed structure has absorptivity higher than
90% at wideband 480–1480 nm, which covers both the visible and near infrared region. The
proposed MA exhibits the 10 absorption peaks of the absorption spectrum, corresponding to the
10 metallic-dielectric layers. The obtained BW value of the proposed MA is 102%, which indicates
an ultrabroadband absorption characteristic as presented in Fig. 3. The average absorption over
the operating absorption band is used to analyze the absorption efficiency of MAs, which can be
calculated as an (1).
 λU
1
A A VG = A (λ)dλ (1)
λ U − λ L λL
where A (λ) is the wavelength response of the absorption coefficient. According to the calculation,
the average absorption of the proposed MA reaches up to 99.2% over the wavelength range of
480–1480 nm, which is higher than the previously reported values [6], [20].
To understand the absorption mechanism of the proposed MA, the electric and magnetic field, as
well as the surface current distributions at three specific wavelengths at 480, 937 and 1480 nm are
investigated, as shown in Figs. 4 and 5. The induced electric field, the induced magnetic field and
the surface current are located at the top of the proposed structure at a wavelength of 480 nm. By
increasing the wavelength from 480 nm to 1480 nm, the location of the electromagnetic resonance
is moved from the top to the bottom layer. Furthermore, the surface currents are concentrated on
both sides of a dielectric layer in the form of circulating anti-parallel currents (see Fig. 5), thereby

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Fig. 4. Cross-section of a unit cell with electric and magnetic field amplitude (panels in top bottom row,
respectively) of the proposed MA at different wavelengths under TE polarization (a), (d) at 480 nm; (b),
(e) at 937 nm and (c), (f) at 1480 nm.

Fig. 5. Cross-section of a unit cell with the surface current distributions of the proposed MA at wave-
lengths of (a) 480 nm, (b) 937 nm and (c) 1480 nm and (d) the induced magnetic field corresponds to
the anti-parallel surface currents at normal incidence under TE polarization.

corresponding to the magnetic resonance [22], [24]. Given anti-parallel currents between the two
metallic layers, magnetic dipole parallel to the magnetic field polarization is created. The induced
magnetic field with its maximum at the center of the circulating current can be observed in Fig. 4(d)–
(f), whereas the induced electric field is accumulated at the edge of the disks, as shown in Fig. 4(a)–
(c). Magnetic resonance is critical in realizing a narrow perfect absorption peak of a single-layer MA

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Fig. 6. Absorption efficiencies as a function of incident angle under TE polarization (a and c) and TM
polarization (b and d). Diagrams (a) and (b) show the absorptivity lines at some selected incident angles.

[22], [35]. Thus, the layer dimensions can be tailored to create a specific absorption band, even a
semi-discrete one. This is one important advantage of this design using thin cylindrical layers, along
with the mentioned feasibility of manufacturing. Furthermore, the interlayer exchange coupling of
the electric and magnetic field in the neighbor layers, as evidenced in Figs. 4 and 5, should be a
significant contribution to the observed high absorption of above 90% in the ultrabroadband range
[19], [32].
To further understand the absorption performance of the proposed MA, we investigate the depen-
dence of absorption spectra on the incident angle of both transverse electric (TE) and transverse
magnetic (TM) polarizations. As shown in Fig. 6, the MA exhibits absorptivity higher than 90% with
incident angles up to 60° under both TE and TM polarizations. However, some strong oscillations
are observed for the shorter wavelengths at incident angles larger than 60°. Given the increase of
the oblique incident angle, the incident magnetic field component, which is anti-parallel to the mag-
netic field induced by the surface circulating current [see Fig. 5(d)], decreases. Thus, the induced
magnetic field does not effectively cancel out the incident magnetic field, thereby resulting in the
decrease of absorption. Despite this fact, the absorptivity of the proposed MA is maintained above
80% even when the incident angle reaches 70°.
Furthermore, the polarization behavior of the proposed MA is investigated for different polarization
angles of 0°, 30°, 60°, 80° and 90° under both TE and TM polarizations, as shown in Fig. 7. The
absorption spectra are absolutely invariant for both TE and TM polarization angles. In other words,
the MA is insensitive to the polarization angle and this property is possible because of the rotational
symmetry of the MA structure.
Finally, the comparison of absorption performance between the proposed MA and the other
broadband MA designed by stacking multilayered structure is studied. The broadband MA char-
acteristics in terms of wavelength range, bandwidth, average BW per layer, incident angle and
polarization insensitivity are shown in Table 1. The proposed MA is the most compact structure
with respect to average BW, wide incident angle and polarization insensitivity. Compared with the
similar MA in [6], the studied one shows a narrower BW due to the lower number layers, but 1.33
times higher average BW per layer, which might be considered as effectively of the design.

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Fig. 7. Absorptions of different polarization angles under TE polarization (a and c) and TM polarization
(b and d) at normal incidence g. 1. A unit cell geometry of the proposed MA: (a) top-view and (b)
side-view.

TABLE 1
Comparison of Absorption Performances of the Proposed Absorber With Other Broadband Absorbers

4. Conclusion
A simple ultrabroadband MA for the visible and near-infrared electromagnetic wave based on a peri-
odic array of metallic-dielectric multilayered conical frustums is numerically demonstrated. The MA
exhibits an absorptivity of higher than 90% in a wide frequency range equivalent to the wavelengths
of 480–1480 nm. This absorptivity can be maintained with a wide incident angle up to 60° for both
TE and TM polarizations. Given its rotational symmetry structure, the ultrabroadband MA is perfectly
polarization independent. Metal and dielectric layers of this MA are in form of thin cylindrical disks,
which is a suitable form for manufacturing with the conventional micro and nanotechnology. Their
number and diameter can be tailored for a desired absorption band. Compared with the previously
reported MAs, the proposed one presents an improved practical feasibility in terms of manufacturing,
compact structure for large bandwidth, wide incident angle and polarization insensitivity and is thus
a potential candidate for future applications such as solar energy harvesting and thermal emitter.

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