Consequences of Unit Cell Design in Metamaterial Perfect Absorbers

Metamaterials are a new class of composite materials with unusual properties that allow controlling of electromagnetic waves by properly engineering the response functions, which are not observed in constituent materials. However, since absorption of metamaterials is mainly based on electromagnetic resonances, the operating bandwidth is relatively narrow. Utilization of more than a single metallic structure with different geometrical parameters in each unit cell is a common way of accomplishing multiple band and/or broadband absorption. There are two usual approaches for this purpose: (a) multilayer unit cell design where metallic structures on dielectric substrate are stacked one on top of the other; (b) side by side unit cell design where metallic structures are distributed on a dielectric substrate. However, to the best of our knowledge, these two different approaches are not comparatively investigated. In this study, we propose metamaterial-based perfect absorbers with two different unit cell designs and simulate transmittances, reflectances and absorbances for each design by a commercial electromagnetic solver, CST Microwave Studio. It is found that each design has its own advantages in terms of device thickness, absorption bandwidth and angular dependence, which might be severely important for particular purposes.