Tunable perfect meta-absorber with high sensitivity for refractive index sensing application

An infrared (IR) tunable perfect meta-absorber (TPM) is presented, which is configured of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structure. The unit cell of the TPM device is composed of two opposite T-shaped and two rod-shaped Au resonators on the reflective mirror layer. The optimized feature size of TPM can achieve perfect absorption and the resonant wavelength can be tuned from blue-shift first and then red-shift by increasing the gap size between two T-shaped resonators continuously. The tuning process of red shift is linear. By changing the distance between two rod-shaped resonators, the TPM device exhibits red shift linearly. Moreover, TPM device shows polarization-dependent characteristic that the main absorption resonance can be attenuated from 100% to 0% by changing polarization angle from 0° to 90° of incident IR light. The resonance of TPM device has an excellent linear relationship with the ambient refractive index, and the sensitivity and maximum figure of merit (FOM) are calculated as 1249 nm/RIU and 21 RIU⁻¹, respectively. These results prove that the design of the proposed TPM device is very suitable for the use of IR sensing, polarization switching, and refractive index sensing applications.