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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., Comment: 26 pages, 12 figures

We propose an efficient multiband absorber comprising a truncated one-dimensional periodic metal-dielectric photonic crystal and a reflective substrate. The reflective substrate is actually an optically thick metallic film. Such a planar device is easier to fabricate compared with the absorbers with complicated shapes. For a 4-unit cell device, all of the four absorption peaks can be optimized with efficiencies higher than 95%. Moreover, those absorption peaks are insensitive to both polarization and incident angle. The influences of the geometrical parameters along with the refractive index of the dielectric on the device performance are discussed as well. Furthermore, it is found that the number of absorption peaks within each photonic band exactly corresponds to the number of the unit cells because the truncated photonic crystal lattices have the function of selecting resonant modes. It is also displayed that the total absorption efficiency gradually increases when there are more metal-dielectric unit cells placing on top of the metallic substrate. Our work is expected to have some potential applications in the areas of solar energy harvesting and thermal emission tailoring., Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the author because one of the authors would like his name being only acknowledged

Metal-dielectric multilayer metamaterials with extreme loss-anisotropy, in which the longitudinal component of the permittivity tensor has ultra-large imaginary part, are proposed and designed. Diffraction-free deep subwavelength beam propagation and manipulation, due to the nearly flat iso-frequency contour (IFC), is demonstrated in such loss-anisotropic metamaterials. It is also shown that deep subwavelength beam propagation can be realized in practical multilayer structures with large multilayer period, when the nonlocal effect is considered., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures

An infrared perfect absorber based on gold nanowire metamaterial cavities array on a gold ground plane is designed. The metamaterial made of gold nanowires embedded in alumina host exhibits an effective permittivity with strong anisotropy, which supports cavity resonant modes of both electric dipole and magnetic dipole. The impedance of the cavity modes matches the incident plane wave in free space, leading to nearly perfect light absorption. The incident optical energy is efficiently converted into heat so that the local temperature of the absorber will increase. Simulation results show that the designed metamaterial absorber is polarization-insensitive and nearly omnidirectional for the incident angle., Comment: 3 pages, 4 figures

Here we demonstrate that giant transverse optical forces can be generated in nanoscale slot waveguides of hyperbolic metamaterials, with more than two orders of magnitude stronger compared to the force created in conventional silicon slot waveguides, due to the nanoscale optical field enhancement and the extreme optical energy compression within the air slot region. Both numerical simulation and analytical treatment are carried out to study the dependence of the optical forces on the waveguide geometries and the metamaterial permittivity tensors, including the attractive optical forces for the symmetric modes and the repulsive optical forces for the anti-symmetric modes. The significantly enhanced transverse optical forces result from the strong optical mode coupling strength between two metamaterial waveguides, which can be explained with an explicit relation derived from the coupled mode theory. Moreover, the calculation on realistic metal-dielectric multilayer structures indicates that the predicted giant optical forces are achievable in experiments, which will open the door for various optomechanical applications in nanoscale, such as optical nanoelectromechanical systems, optical sensors and actuators., Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures

Nanoscale slot waveguides of hyperbolic metamaterials are proposed and demonstrated for achieving large optical field enhancement. The dependence of the enhanced electric field within the air slot on waveguide mode coupling and permittivity tensors of hyperbolic metamaterials is analyzed both numerically and analytically. Optical intensity in the metamaterial slot waveguide can be more than 25 times stronger than that in a conventional silicon slot waveguide, due to tight optical mode confinement enabled by the ultrahigh refractive indices supported in hyperbolic metamaterials. The electric field enhancement effects are also verified with the realistic metal-dielectric multilayer waveguide structure., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures

We propose deep-subwavelength optical waveguides based on metal-dielectric multilayer indefinite metamaterials with ultrahigh effective refractive indices. Waveguide modes with different mode orders are systematically analyzed with numerical simulations based on both metal-dielectric multilayer structures and the effective medium approach. The dependences of waveguide mode indices, propagation lengths and mode areas on different mode orders, free space wavelengths and sizes of waveguide cross sections are studied. Furthermore, waveguide modes are also illustrated with iso-frequency contours in the wave vector space in order to investigate the mechanism of waveguide mode cutoff for high order modes. The deep-subwavelength optical waveguide with a size smaller than {\lambda}0/50 and a mode area in the order of 10-4 {\lambda}02 is realized, and an ultrahigh effective refractive index up to 62.0 is achieved at the telecommunication wavelength. This new type of metamaterial optical waveguide opens up opportunities for various applications in enhanced light-matter interactions., Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures

A new formalism for electromagnetic and mechanical momenta in a metamaterial is developed by means of the technique of wave-packet integrals. The medium has huge mass density and can therefore be regarded as almost stationary upon incident electromagnetic waves. A clear identification of momentum density and momentum flow, including their electromagnetic and mechanical parts, is obtained by employing this formalism in a lossless dispersive metamaterial (including the cases of impedance matching and mismatching with vacuum). It is found that the ratio of the electromagnetic momentum density to the mechanical momentum density depends on the impedance and group velocity of the electromagnetic wave inside the metamaterial. One of the definite results is that both the electromagnetic momentum and the mechanical momentum in the metamaterial are in the same direction as the energy flow, instead of in the direction of the wave vector. The conservation of total momentum is verified. In addition, the law of energy conservation in the process of normal incidence is also verified by using the wave-packet integral of both the electromagnetic energy density and the electromagnetic power density, of which the latter is caused by the interaction between the induced (polarized) currents and the electromagnetic wave., Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures