Effect of Unit Cell Shape on Switchable Infrared Metamaterial VO(2) Absorbers/Emitters

Metamaterial absorber/emitter is an important aspect of infrared radiation manipulation. In this paper, we proposed four simple switchable infrared metamaterial absorbers/emitters with Ag/VO(2) disks on the Ag plane employing triangle, square, hexagon, and circle unit cells. The spectral absorption peaks whose intensities are above 0.99 occur at ~4 μm after structure optimization when VO(2) is in insulating state and disappear when VO(2) becomes metallic state. The simulated electromagnetic field reveals that the spectral absorption peaks are attributed to the excitation of magnetic polariton within the insulating VO(2) spacer layer, whose values exceed 1.59 orders of magnitude higher than the incident magnetic field. Longer resonant wavelength would be excited in square arrays because its configuration is a better carrier of charges at the same spans. For absorption stability, the absorbers/emitters with square and circular structures do not have any change with the polarization angles changing from 0° to 90°, due to the high rotational symmetric structure. And four absorbers/emitters reveal similar shifts and attenuations under different incident angles. We believed that the switchable absorber/emitter demonstrates promising applications in the sensing technology and adaptive infrared system.