Tailoring active color rendering and multiband photodetection in a vanadium-dioxide-based metamaterial absorber

Abstract

Metamaterials have demonstrated exotic electromagnetic properties, which offer a good platform for realizing light absorption, photodetection, filtering, and so on. However, broadband multifunctional metamaterial absorbers are restricted in cascaded structures. Here, broadband multifunctional properties were realized by introducing vanadium dioxide into a metamaterial absorber. Through the modified design and highly efficient utilization of multiple resonant modes, both plasmonic tunable color filters and near-infrared photodetectors can be simultaneously achieved by this construction. Meanwhile, active color and a photodetection band in the near-infrared range can become tunable with the insulating-metallic transition of vanadium dioxide. Thus, the variations of rendering colors could correspondingly indicate shifts of the near-infrared photodetection bands. This method theoretically confirms the feasibility of designing multifunctional devices via a vanadium-dioxide-based metamaterial absorber, which holds great promise for future versatile utilization of multiple physical mechanisms to achieve numerous functionalities in a simple nanostructure or device.

Recent Progress in Active Optical Metasurfaces

“…Kats et al have shown that the mid‐infrared plasmonic response of nanoantenna arrays can be modulated by using the index change of an underlying VO 2 substrate in proximity to its phase transition . Recent studies showed that, via direct thermal control, dynamically manipulated plasmonic color ( Figure a), extinction ratio, and polarization state of light (Figure 3b) can be achieved in hybrid metasurfaces integrated with VO 2 nanostructures.…”

Metasurface Color Filters Using Aluminum and Lithium Niobate Configurations

“…Most of designs are in the IR [10][11][12][25][26][27] and THz [28][29][30][31] spectral ranges. Although there have been various reported approaches for actively tunable metasurfaces in the visible spectral range, such as mechanical stretching [32], electrostatic force [33], Mie resonance [34], liquid crystal [35], phase change material [36][37][38], and electrooptic material [39,40] However, the number of studies on actively tunable metasurfaces in the visible spectral range is limited. Among the tuning mechanisms of electro-optical methods, graphene-based tunable metasurface recently draws a massive attention to researchers [41][42][43].…”

Plasmonics Induced Multifunction Optical Device via Hoof-Shaped Subwavelength Structure

“…In recent years, the enhanced optical transmission (EOT) effect brought by metal-based surface plasmons has been applied in different wavelengths, including visible light, near-infrared and infrared ranges. Correspondingly, a large number of micro/nano structures have been proposed, such as: circle holes [4], stripe grating hole [5], single/double aperture hole [6], composite structure [7], cross-shaped hole [8], triangular hole [9]; Also, a large number of devices and applications have been constructed, for example: A absorber device that realizes broadband multifunctional properties by introducing vanadium dioxide into a metamaterial [10]; A filter device that realizes multiple channels working simultaneously by changing the number of concentric apertures [11]; A color sensor was realized using interference effects in the metal-insulator-metal Fabry-Perot (FP) cavity of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) as the dielectric layer [12]; The function of displaying different colors in the visible light range is realized by changing the material characteristics and the geometric parameters 2 of 9 of the structure, in order to achieve the application of the structure color [13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. However, the devices proposed by researchers have the defects of single function, complex structure and expensive materials; they cannot achieve better performance when the devices are integrated.…”