# All-dielectric metasurface absorber

Metamaterials and metasurfaces can achieve functionalities that are not available to naturally occurring materials such as negative refractive index. Originally, metamaterials often utilize metallic structures. These metallic structures, such as split ring resonators, exhibit strong resonances at specific frequencies, which can be effectively tuned by adjusting the geometric parameters. However, metals exhibit large loss at optical frequencies. This can greatly impair the performance of the metamaterials. As a consequence, metamaterials fully based on dielectric materials have attracted a lot of interest recently.

Electromagnetic absorber is one of the most popular categories of metasurfaces. Metasurfaces with high absorption can be used as radiation power detectors since they convert electromagnetic radiation into thermal energy at high efficiency. This model demonstrates how to simulate an all-dielectric metasurface absorber at the THz regime. The design consists of a cylindrical silicon resonator on a thin PDMS substrate. The design parameters are adapted from Kebin Fan, Jonathan Y. Suen, Xinyu Liu, and Willie J. Padilla, “All-dielectric metasurface absorbers for uncooled terahertz imaging,” Optica 4, 601-604 (2017) (opens new window).

To view the full example in Python, please click here (opens new window).