Broadband transparency of Babinet complementary metamaterials

Abstract

According to the Babinet principle, the diffraction pattern from an opaque body is identical to that from a hole of the same shape and size. Intuitively, placing two complementary structures such as an opaque metal body and its transparent counterpart one by one may result in destructive or constructive interference leading to unexpected electromagnetic response. We propose a Babinet principle-based metamaterial made of two complementary metal/hole checkerboards. The unit cell of each layer is either a metal square with 1/4 of 8 neighboring squares, four of which are made of metal, whereas the other four are square holes, or vice versa. Being placed complementary at optimal distance equal to three-unit cell length, the compound bi-layered Babinet structure demonstrates absolute transparency in a very broad frequency range. The observed absolute transparency of the bi-layered Babinet metasurface is the result of the modified multipole interaction of layers with shifted centers of radiation. We demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally absolute transmission of 0 dB for the Babinet metamaterial made of 3 cm sized Cu squares and complementary holes in the broad frequency range from 4.5 to 6.62 GHz in simulations and from 4.6 to 6.4 GHz in the experiment when the distance between two layers is 1.2 cm. Moving layers toward each other leads to blurring of the resonances. The proven concept of simple, reproducible, and scalable design of the Babinet metamaterial paves the way for the fabrication of broadband transparent devices at any frequency, including THz and optical ranges. The main advantage of broadband Babine metamaterials is applications in optical switching, sensing, filtering, and slow light devices.