Wideband optical absorber based on plasmonic metamaterial cross structure

The optical absorber with Fano response is valuable for various applications such as solar cells or optical sensors. In this paper, we have modeled an optical plasmonic metamaterial absorber which contains a broken cross as an elementary cell along with four rectangular loads to improve the absorbance and achieve a Fano response within a wide bandwidth at 190–245 THz (25%). The bandwidth of the proposed structure is more than conventional metamaterial absorbers. The prototype absorber has a remarkable enhancement in the electric field in comparison with the simple cross model and the reflection value has reduced to − 47 dB. The parametric studies show how the gap capacitance controls the bandwidth, resonance frequency and the reflection value of the absorber, therefore we can consider this technique as a way to enhance the metamaterial absorber’s bandwidth. The proposed structure can be used as an optical refractive index sensor while the Fano line-shape provides a higher figure of merit (FOM) compared with many others. For this structure, the FOM has obtained as 10,660. The Finite Integration Technique with Perfect Boundary Approximation used for the simulation.