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The bandwidths of thermal-tunable metamaterial perfect absorbers (MPAs) based on the phase change materials such as Ge2Sb2Te5 and VO2 are usually hundreds of nanometers at near-infrared frequency. Amorphous silicon (a-Si) provides the approach to achieve linearly thermal-tunable ultra-narrowband MPAs, if the absorption band is narrow enough. Four-nanorod-coupled a-Si resonators are proposed in this Letter. An absorption band at 1064 nm is obtained with ultra-narrow bandwidth (FWHM) only 1.4 nm by exciting the coupled magnetic dipole (CMD) mode, which exhibits great linearity to the temperature. In addition, the thermo-optical sensitivity (S=Δλ/ΔT) is about 0.08 nm/°C. The figure of merit of the thermal tunability performance FOM=S/FWHM=0.06. As a modulator, the critical temperature of absorptivity at 1064 nm is only 40°C, which is much lower than the Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) and VO2. In addition, the modulation depth is up to 82% at near-infrared frequency.

Plasmonic resonances in metal-dielectric-metal structures have shown strong electric and magnetic fields enhancement in the sub-wavelength region, which can significantly boost the performance of plasmon-based metamaterial absorbers. Square resonators (SR) and ring resonators (RR) are both the most common blocks for designing metamaterial perfect absorbers (MPAs) by exciting fundamental electric dipole plasmonic modes. Actually, they can also excite the higher-order electric sextupole plasmonic modes but the absorptivity is very low, which are not available for the design of MPAs. In this paper, the near-field-coupling idea is introduced to enhance the absorptivity of higher-order electric sextupole modes. We propose the outer-square inner-ring coupled resonators (OSIRCR) made of the Ag and ZnS. When the coupling distance has decreased from 70 to 10 nm, the electric field intensity has increased 10.8 times from 55 to 594, which leads to a 5.4 times increase in absorptivity of higher-order electric sextupole modes of the outer-square from 17.6% to 95.3%. In addition to the higher-order electric sextupole modes, the OSIRCR can also excite the fundamental electric dipole modes of the outer-square and the inner-ring. Then a six-band polarization-independent MPA in the infrared range is designed with an average absorptivity of 91.5% utilizing two different sized OSIRCRs.

Multiband metamaterial perfect absorbers (MPAs) have promising applications in many fields like microbolometers, infrared detection, biosensing, and thermal emitters. In general, the single resonator can only excite a fundamental mode and achieve single absorption band. The multiband MPA can be achieved by combining several different sized resonators together. However, it's still challenging to design the MPA with absorption bands of more than four and average absorptivity of more than 90% due to the interaction between differently sized resonators. In this paper, three absorption bands are successfully achieved with average absorptivity up to 98.5% only utilizing single one our designed ring-strip resonator, which can simultaneously excite a fundamental electric dipole mode, a higher-order electric quadrupole mode, and a higher-order electric octopole mode. As the biosensor, the sensing performance of the higher-order modes is higher than the fundamental modes. Then we try to increase the absorption bands by combining different sized ring-strip resonators together and make the average absorptivity above 90% by optimizing the geometry parameters. A six-band MPA is achieved by combining two different sized ring-strip resonators with average absorptivity up to 98.8%, which can excite two dipole modes, two quadrupole modes, and two octopole modes. A twelve-band MPA is achieved by combining four different sized ring-strip resonators with average absorptivity up to 93.7%, which can excite four dipole modes, four quadrupole modes, and four octopole modes.

In this paper, an all-metal nanostructure is designed with a large frequency ratio (∼6) and a large bandwidth ratio (∼32), and consists of period slit-box cavities and nanodisk clusters. It is a nearly perfect absorber at 1.064 μm to achieve laser stealth, a frequency-selective emitter with low emissivity in wavelength ranges 3-5 and 8-14 μm to achieve infrared stealth, and also an emitter with near unity emissivity at 2.709 μm and 6.107 μm to compensate for the decrease of radiation heat transfer owing to the low emissivity. The absorption/emission peaks are all the Lorentzian shape, and the bandwidths, defined as full width at half-maximum, are 35, 408, and 1124 nm at 1.064, 2.709, and 6.107 μm, respectively. The electric and magnetic field distribution shows that the slit behaves like a capacitor, the box behaves like an inductance, and the nanodisk clusters can excite electric dipole resonance. Considering the solar irradiation, the nanostructure maintains middle-wavelength infrared signal reduction rates greater than 80% from 450 to 1000 K, and long-wavelength infrared signal reduction rates greater than 90% from room temperature to 1000 K. The laser and infrared stealth performances of our nanostructure at 473 K are also studied with different incident angles and polarization angles.