Silicon based mid-IR super absorber using hyperbolic metamaterial

Abstract

Perfect absorbers are indispensable components for energy harvesting applications. While many absorbers have been proposed, they encounter inevitable drawbacks including bulkiness or instability over time. The urge for CMOS compatible absorber that can be integrated for on chip applications requires further investigation. We theoretically demonstrate Silicon (Si) based mid IR super absorber with absorption (A) reaching 0.948. Our structure is composed of multilayered N-doped Si/ Si hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM) integrated with sub-hole Si grating. Our proposed structure has tunable absorption peak that can be tuned from 4.5 µm to 11 µm through changing the grating parameters. We also propose two grating designs integrated with N-doped Si/ Si HMM that can achieve wide band absorption. The first grating design is based on Si grating incorporating different holes’ height with (A) varying between 0.83 and 0.97 for wavelength from 5 µm to 7 µm. The second grating design is based on Si grating with variable holes’ diameter; the latter shows broad band absorption with the maximum (A) reaching 0.97. We also show that our structure is omnidirectional. We propose an all Si based absorber which demonstrates a good candidate for thermal harvesting application.